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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life episode 331, part two. We've been discussing volume two of either or 1843, specifically the first half of the essay, the balance between the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of the personality. I believe we were, when we stopped about to say more about why this character, the judge, is crapping on philosophy specifically. Isn't that taking life seriously? Isn't that having an ethical philosophy? Not just merely drifting along.

0:41 Wes: Yeah. So on page 170 where he says, I'm not someone who sacrificed his life to philosophy and art like you. I'm just a married man who's into, you know, his day job and children and the rest of his life. But I have a life, unlike you. So he'll say, you know, my preoccupations are trifles compared to your big dreams. There's a big dose of irony in that. But essentially he's going to say in this section that philosophy takes him out of the realm of action. And as the critique writes, so life comes to a halt. You're politically disengaged or otherwise disengaged. But as this critique elaborates over the next few pages, it kind of incorporates a critique of the Hegelian conception of history and its relation to freedom.

1:31 Seth: He explicitly connects philosophy to youth. And to continue to bang the drum on this whole notion of creative, you know, self actualization or create, you know, manufacture. He's equivocating in some respects the philosophical position and the aesthetic position in the sense that they're both contemplative and not focused on choice and action. But you know, he's saying it's a young man's game, which is to say it's immature and to a certain extent naive, while at the same time being made only possible by certain, let's call them not necessities, but certain contingencies which are typical of that age.

So before you get married, before you have kids, before you have a job, before you do all these things, you have a leisure. It's like you're the obnoxious, cigarette smoking, beret wearing goth college kid in the cafe with the very obvious copy of Being and Nothingness on the table. You're not actually reading it, but you're making sure everybody knows that you have it there. And I have a really nice quote on 172. I have a valid claim against philosophy, as does anyone whom it does not dare to dismiss on the grounds of total incompetence. I'm a married man.

I have children. What if I now ask in their name what a human being has to do in life? You will perhaps smile in any case, the philosophical young people will smile at the family man. And yet I think it is truly an enormous argument against philosophy if it has nothing to answer. Let's see.

3:02 Wes: Yeah, you know, it was on the previous page where he's on 171 where he's saying something very similar, which is that philosophy doesn't really have an answer to the question of what am I supposed to do in life? It doesn't really have these self help applications. So what are you doing then? Why are you spending so much time thinking if there's no practical upshot? And then by the time we get into 173, he's casting that in terms of a critique of Hegelian conception of history, which is to say philosophy keeps everything in the realm of necessity.

If everything is a world historical process that we are all part of, if we're all part of the development of the Geist. We're all just parts of that. Then there can't be such a thing as freedom. And the Hegelian synthesis, or mediation is what he calls it, right? So mediation is the process by which particulars come under concepts or by which concepts come under higher concepts, or the thesis and antithesis come under a synthesis. And that defines the Hegelian historical process, which is also a logical process. That mediation, that process of successive mediation leaves no room for freedom, I think, according to Kierkegaard.

So there's a. There's a great quote on 173, you know, if you admit mediation, there is no absolute choice. No either or. This is the difficulty. Yet I believe it is due partially to a confusion of the two spheres with each other. The spheres of thought and of freedom. Right, the theoretical and the practical. For thought, the contradiction does not exist. It passes over into the other and thereupon together with the other into a higher unity for freedom, the contradiction does exist because it excludes it. So this Hegelian like unity machine, synthesis machine, which kind of grabs up all the previous contradictions and reconciles them to each other at the level of theory, I think Kierkegaard wants to say, actually, you know, no, if you want to preserve the realm of the ethical, you don't just get to reconcile and synthesize all the contradictions.

There's a fundamental contradiction that will always remain. The either or in the absolute ethical sense will always remain.

5:21 Dylan: Yeah, I hadn't gotten that. But it makes a lot of sense how one of the problems of philosophy is its constant drive for universalization and seeing that in maybe sort of in spades. And Hegel, it squeezes all the freedom out of the world, or it misses all the freedom that's in the world. So it misses the fundamental aspect of humanity that Kierkegaard's grabbing a hold of. And so philosophy ends up being completely misguided because it is not focused on the most important characteristics and needs for human beings as human beings, things that help form and direct their freedom, or it simply has the wrong hierarchy, even if it recognizes freedom. But I think you're pointing out, Wes, that in the Hegelian conception, in the end, there some level isn't.

6:14 Wes: Yeah, it's a little unclear to me, Hegel on freedom. But we kind of have some familiarity with how German idealism approached this problem coming out of Kant. There's this huge problem. There's always a problem for early modern philosophy, the advent of modern science, free will versus determinism. In Kant, it becomes quite acute. And the German idealists, Fulham are very unsatisfied with the fact that Kant is going to admit that there's this. That the world as we know it in the natural world is an empirical realm of necessity and there's no place for freedom in it.

And yet at the noumenal level, we're supposed to somehow have freedom. And the whole project is to reconcile those two things by making the practical and the area of freedom the priority. So that it's like another Copernican revolution. Everything gets revolved around preserving the concept of freedom. So you have Fichte saying, hey, we produce the world from the ego in such a way that because we produce it, then we can be free within it. We determine the world. It's not that the world determines us, it's the other way around.

7:15 Mark: We program the matrix. We all programmed it.

7:18 Wes: It's like we are in the. Yeah, we are in the matrix. We, you know, we are in the realm of necessity, but we also programmed it that way. That's a good word. So that even if I'm necessitated in doing something, I created that necessity of my own free will, and therefore it's free. Something like that. That's a little bit of a bastardization of the point of view. So that's Fichte. And there's even this weird, you know, if you remember the vocation of man stuff, this weird idea that really God is kind of harmonizing things to allow for freedom to work in the world of necessity.

But in any case, I'm a little unclear on how all that's supposed to work in Hegel. What's clear to me is Kierkegaard doesn't think it works very well on 174. He'll say, you know, again, and this could say, maybe he's unfairly identifying philosophy with Hegelianism, but that's. That's a conversation for another time. But, you know, he'll say that basically this philosophical framework of a movement in world history. Okay, so here's the way he puts it. The higher order digests free actions and works them together in its eternal laws. And this necessity is the movement in world history.

So philosophy has nothing to do with the inner quote. And this is the most important part, I think, the inner deed, the true life of freedom. Philosophy considers the external deed that has been assimilated into and transformed in the world historical process. So you can't get an either or out of that. Anyway, I thought it was worth pausing on that. Just because this connection to Hegel, I think, is very important for understanding Kierkegaard. The either or, in a way, is a challenge to the Hegelian dialectic.

8:51 Dylan: Just after that, where you were reading, he says, philosophy has nothing at all to do with what could be called the inner deed. But the inner deed is the true life of freedom. So this gets back to action choice as the internal action.

9:07 Mark: Freedom we said before excludes the contradiction. So Hegel's view, everything that seems opposed, you can actually see how it fits together in the historical process. And so a later stage will assimilate the two, will sublate the two opposed contradictions. Top of 174. It has not become perfect by more and more assimilating evil, but by more and more excluding it. But the exclusion is the very opposite of mediation. So sorry, choice or freedom has not become more perfect by assimilating evil. So you actually need to reject a thing. I'm not sure how exactly to connect this to the critique of Hegelianism as a philosophy of history is just that it's historical, it's backward looking.

So when you say, why did this great person do this thing? Why did Napoleon arise? Why did Napoleon make the choices? You say, well, because sort of that's what history called for. Those were the ideas that were in the air. All that stuff. You can sort of make sense retrospectively, even of your own actions. But when you're actually in the moment, that's just not the way it works at all.

10:14 Wes: Yeah, everything that happened in the past happens because Hegel predicted it retroactively.

10:21 Dylan: This may seem a little trivial, but it merely makes me think about the way in which the distinction between whether it's you or a student or someone reading a manual or a set of instructions about how to do something, whether it be fix something and then say, oh, you know what, I get it. I totally understand what's going on. And then you go and you go to fix it and you have no idea what to do because you have to make choices on how to figure it out.

10:49 Wes: 176. He takes this line from Luke. Winning the whole world but losing oneself. That to him kind of sums up philosophy. You win the whole world in the sense of the theoretical realm, but you lose.

11:01 Mark: Though you could analyze the whole world.

11:03 Wes: Yeah, yeah, I fight for freedom either, or the treasure and inner being.

11:08 Mark: And so I don't know if this is off topic, but the thought of theodicy came to mind here, of a primordial, a temporal version of what Hegel was doing that you say we live in the best possible world. What about all these tragedies? Well, let me show you how in the big scheme of things, the tragedies, the apparent evils sort of fit in either as building blocks that are needed to found something greater and higher as sort of steps up along the way to that which actually could take place in history, or they're the inevitable byproducts of the things around them being the best that they could possibly be.

So we've talked about theodicies before and do we think that Kierkegaard would be as hostile toward Leibniz, for instance, as he is towards Hegel? Just because Leibniz seems like much more of Mensch when it comes to a positive ethics, you know, certainly glorifying God. Right, let's put it that way. So Leibniz, like Kierkegaard, is, yea, God. God is on the top. What is our actual relation to God? I mean, even with the monads, you could see we're even somehow part of God, but not in the debased way that Spinoza thought. We have, you know, certain reflection.

I don't know, it seems like Leibniz

12:24 Wes: is, well, the monads are part of the natural world.

12:26 Dylan: I would think that he would find him unsatisfying because again, he's trying to solve God shows up as a way to wedge God into a deterministic world. But in the end, it's all God's will. And even if there's alignment here, maybe we'll see that more clearly in fear and trembling. And it's really rooted in the action of the individual. And that's right now, at least that's not framed in the context of God moving your soul to make you do that thing.

13:02 Seth: Yeah, the way you just framed that question mark. You're basically saying if Kierkegaard was to run from idealism, would he run towards rationalism? And I don't think that's the case.

13:14 Mark: The one part I forgot to state on this is part of why we live in the best possible world is because God allows us freedom. So God is not putting us as a cog in the best possible world. We are sort of by necessity, every human being is a point of indeterminacy as far as God is concerned, because we have the freedom of choice. And so yes, a lot of bad stuff is going to come out of that. But the fact that we live in the best possible world does not in any way, like the most charged against the Confucians, mean that, whoa, there's just destiny. And we don't have to try like no. Free will is like the thing that makes the world so awesome. And we've been given that. And so it is all the more contingent on us to sort of hold up our side, you know, to take this quilt that God has handed us and make our little part of it as awesome as it could be.

14:08 Dylan: I'd have to go back and read Leibniz. That's because just the way you characterized him. I don't remember being convinced that he was actually allowing for. I mean he may might have said those words, but the way in which the monads are supposed to work, which are also our souls, I think he's. I think thou doth protest too much kind of thing.

14:27 Wes: Okay, well on the theodicy that we read, yeah, there's an emphasis on freedom in the monadology. It gets complicated, right, because the monads are all windowless monads whose experiences are being synchronized by God. So it's almost like Malebranche. There's no direct interaction and everything has its own little script. Your life is kind of pre programmed from start to finish. And how that fits in freedom is very confusing. So in any case, I think the lesson is Leibniz is a precursor. There's an idealism going on in Leibniz, this idea of monads. And he's a precursor to all this. This stuff that I think Kierkegaard is reacting to. And yeah, going backwards into rationalism makes it even more or complicated probably.

15:10 Mark: As far as a general critique of philosophy, the other thing that occurred to me was just his attitude toward stoicism is a lot of the kind of things he says seem to advocate for some kind of stoicism. But on the other hand, the stoic withdrawal as a hovering above is guilty of some of the things that he says romantics are guilty of.

15:31 Wes: It's interesting here. He tries to. I don't know if what I'm about to say directly addresses that, but I. You have me thinking of him trying to reconcile. At a certain point he gives us a caveat, which is to say the ethical doesn't exclude the aesthetic. In a way, it includes it. And once you make a choice, the aesthetic returns. So I'm looking at 177 and 178. So it returns insofar okay, this is actually quite complicated. Maybe we don't want to spend too much time on this. I have a little bit of a theory about it, but you'll say the aesthetic is excluded at an absolute level, but it returns on A relative level as we become ourselves by choosing ourselves.

16:14 Dylan: It's just funny that you said this is important, but it's confusing. I literally have a question mark on this paragraph. It says, seems important.

16:24 Wes: Yeah. I think part of this, you know, the aesthetic. I mean, I think we have to remind ourselves it's also there's a number of different associated meanings. One of the meanings is just the empirical realm of necessity and determination, as opposed to the realm of freedom. The classic dichotomy either. Or is this classic necessity, freedom dichotomy. And part of that is what Kant called the empirical ego. That is a domain in which the personality falls. This gets at. I forget who was saying this. You know, it's a. I think it was you, Dylan. It's kind of a hodgepodge of different conceptions of freedom, including more of a empirical psychology conception of freedom, a psychological conception of freedom.

And I think what he might be saying, it's very speculative, is that there's a sense in which once I've made a choice in the absolute sense, in the domain of freedom, it's manifested in the empirical realm, in the sense that it has an effect on who I am, who I become. So he'll go on to say, but what does it mean to live. This is on page 178 as well. What does it mean to live aesthetically, and what does it mean to live ethically? What is the aesthetic in a person? What is the ethical. To that I would respond. The aesthetic in a person is that by which he is spontaneously and immediately is what he is.

The ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes. The person who lives in and by and from and for the aesthetic that is in him. That person lives aesthetically. So this concept of immediacy, right, is associated with sensation, associated with desire, associated with just. Just following inclination. You know, you're living out your essence in a deterministic realm. That's the aesthetic. But when you shape yourself by making choices, by making these free choices, that comes to manifest itself back in the aesthetic realm, right? So if I'm.

If I make some effort to become a different type of person, maybe it is a mundane thing like I become a doctor at some point. That starts out with choices, that starts out with freedom, but it ends up in a role and in the aesthetic realm. And something that I do habitually, right? Something that is no longer a matter of choice and decision. That is my take on what he means by all of this.

18:42 Dylan: I did find myself a little bit confused about the notion of the aesthetic being associated with necessity. And because it made me think the way in which it's like associated with the empirical and scientific. But the way you just described it, Wes, makes it a little bit, a lot more clear in the presentness of it. In that, I guess I naively think about someone who is just wrapped up in the aesthetic as someone who's constantly choosing one thing over another, choosing between things. And I get the criticism of it being shallow, but this characterization is saying is that it really is a faux choice for the person driven by the aesthetic.

They're really being driven by underlying empirical characteristics of themselves in that they're not using their soul to make choices. It makes me think that the criticism, the characterization of the aesthetic for Kierkegaard is a lot more like a kind of desire driven purely by your basest desires, your physical being. In a way that doesn't make me think that way. When I think of the aesthetic, just

19:52 Wes: that word that's the lowest tier. Like the way we were thinking about this in the last episode is, yeah, on one level, the aesthetic is just about the empirical. It's about the aesthetic in the sense of what's sensible. And then desire comes into play. So we are. We live in an empirical realm. Our senses are being bombarded. There's not just a cognitive component to that. There's a component that involves us being impulsive, right? We could be heteronomous creatures. It could all just be stimulus, response. But then if we remember what A does, right, he's not just like the Don Juan who just lives like an animal and goes around and has sex as much as possible, is not the true aesthetic solution.

That's one version of it. That's the one we just described. That fully heteronomous, impulsive person. But then the higher level aesthetic person tries to turn that into the aesthetic. And the more refined, sublimated sense, in the artistic sense that we've been thinking about it, but that also, right, supposedly is going to fail as well, ends

20:53 Dylan: up being driven by necessity. In a way, it might be have a veneer of sophistication, but it's not Kierkegaard saying that it's not any different

21:00 Wes: because for the Romantics, right, that was the path to freedom, right? Art is a pathway to the absolute, to the infinite and to the free. And this is a direct challenge to that. It's just more of the same in a way, it's a derivative of what's not derivative, but it's an extension of the more animal responses to sensory objects.

21:20 Seth: Okay, I agreed with you and then I stopped agreeing with you in a very quick period of time there. Wes. I don't want to get into that, but I will say that like, I don't think we can characterize the Kierkegaardian aesthete in the same way that we can the Romantic artist. Because for the Romantics, the artist is making choices. Although the artist has to make choices to become the person that they become, that is able to channel the infinite and all that. We talked a lot about technique and how you couldn't have an uneducated or unstudied hand and all that sort of thing. So I would be cautious of that.

21:56 Wes: Well, I think that's what he's attacking, the Romantic.

21:59 Mark: Well, see, I think we said last time that this picture of the Romantic might be misrepresentation of what we actually read in the Schlegels. And I think knowing that this was written first, that like he wrote this thing against the Romantics and then by writing Volume one, he's like, well, let me actually create this straw man so it can actually be the thing. Accurately. I didn't mean that that thing is Schlegel. That that was actually fine. I'm talking about this thing. This is what I'm objecting to.

22:28 Seth: Yeah, I'm sure there's enough in Romantic literature and theory and all that kind of stuff to support Kierkegaard's that it's not a strawman. That being said, I would give Schiller and Schlegels and Schelling a little more credit.

22:44 Wes: Yeah, I'm not saying it's a fair picture of what they're. No, I'm not endorsing the critique necessarily.

22:50 Mark: What I thought about is the more elevated kind that would also be attacked by this. It's not the artist who. Who's sublimating things, but is the reflective person. Because if you say the aesthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is. Yeah, that sounds like the blonde beast. That sounds like the unreflective thing. But we already in our discussion of a. Of Kierkegaard's Romantic said that the person who's being addressed here by this whole letter is somebody who is very self reflective, but still what he spontaneously and immediately is right now is a self reflective, self despising person. That's still only aesthetic. It would be much clearer if it was like the aesthetic is unreflective. The ethical is reflective. Well, no, the ethical is reflective in

23:36 Wes: the right Way A is a thinker and a philosopher. Even this is the way the judge is describing him. He's very thoughtful. This letter is so sophisticated that vast majority of the world would not understand what the hell he's talking about. So A has to be very sophisticated to know what the judge is even saying.

23:56 Mark: But almost like they're the same reader.

23:58 Seth: He kind of. So, Mark, he kind of does say that in the next paragraph after the last one that. That Wes cited. Although I would direct anyone who wants to live aesthetically to you as the most reliable guide, I would not direct him to you if he in a higher sense wish to understand what it means to live aesthetically. For you would be unable to inform him precisely because you yourself are trapped in it. The only person that can explain it to him is the one who stands on a higher level or the one who lives ethically.

24:25 Dylan: Yeah, the best aesthetic life is the ethical version of it.

24:29 Seth: The best version of the aesthetic life is the one upon which there is self reflection, which is enabled by the ethical.

24:37 Mark: Can we pick the top 179? I have a quote here of you've just said, Seth, in the quote you read that you're trapped in your own perspective. I have a superior perspective. And you might respond to that and say, wait, ethical person. You actually just made a leap one way or the other way, and now you're trapped in your perspective. You don't know what it's like to be me.

24:56 Wes: He has a great. A great response.

24:58 Mark: Yeah, well, give the response and see if you are convinced by it.

25:01 Wes: Well, he says no, because being in the ethical is a higher level that incorporates both. So he'll say, I'm not trapped in my judgment of either the aesthetic or the ethical. For in the ethical, I am raised above the moment. I am in freedom.

25:18 Mark: It is a contradiction for anyone to be able to be become trapped by being in freedom. Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, I think Sartre might say.

25:27 Wes: I didn't think this was the strongest rebuttal. This sounds almost like an afterthought. Like Kierkegaard is thinking of objections as he writes and. Oh, wait, let me preempt that objection. So I'm saying he's trapped in the aesthetic. He can accuse me of being trapped in the ethical, but let me come. So let me come up with. You know. But anyway.

25:44 Seth: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, let's get back to the temporal thing. So if you want to try to give the most charitable reading of what he's saying, Remember that the aesthetic or the aesthetic is trapped in immediacy in the present. And because of that, you know, they can't build on the past, construct a future, and also theoretically step outside of the temporal experience in order to reflect on past experience or anticipate future experience. And what he's saying is at the stage of the ethical, you are capable of considering the past, of thinking about past experiences, of making judgments about what those meant or how they can inform your future and to anticipate. And so as soon as you step out of the immediacy of the present, then you can't level that same accusation of being trapped. Because the freedom is that you have the freedom of the past, present and the future.

26:42 Wes: Yeah, I think that's, you know, one can make a convincing argument. And I think it, it kind of leads us.

26:48 Seth: Not Seth, but one.

26:49 Mark: Yeah, no, Seth, in his universality as person who is right in your interpretation.

26:54 Wes: I'm not sure if you and Kierkegaard at the same time, you're part of the world historical process, Seth. So I think it gets us into this concept of stages where he's going to say, okay, look, all these stages have one commonality, which is that the spirit is not qualified by spirit, but is immediately qualified. And there's another, more. There's a clear way of saying that he says earlier on, actually in the argument, which is that the aesthetic posits an external condition. So what does that mean? It means that if you're in the aesthetic position, you're not self reliant, you're relying on these externalities. You're devoted to these externalities. Like I need this, I need that experience or pleasure or whatever.

27:40 Mark: Right. You're totally bringing this back to the stoic point. This is where I just saw this completely is somehow authentically choosing yourself means you are self reliant in some way. You know, you might think I'm gonna choose to fall in love, but if that means that you are surrendering yourself to another person, or you can even, I'm gonna make this leap of faith. I'm gonna become a Catholic. And that means you sign your brain off to obeying all the tenets of Catholicism and whatever the Pope happens to tell you, neither of those things are retaining your own autonomy.

And if you then find out that the person you love doesn't love you back or is cheating on you or blah, blah, blah, doesn't want to be with you, or you find out that the Catholic Church is full of a bunch of pedophiles or that There are steep inconsistencies in the doctrine that you find you actually can't face. Those things can let you down. And so really, you. You need to be more self contained.

28:38 Wes: Yeah. The mandate, right, is to enjoy life. It's interesting because they'll say the person in the aesthetic position has a conception of what the meaning of life is and what its purpose is. They do have a life view. Even though earlier on he's criticized them for not really having an adequate conception of the meaning of life. They think they do, and they think that that conception of the meaning, life comes down to a very simple mandate, which is one must enjoy life. And then he'll say, but the person who says that he wants to enjoy life always posits a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself.

And Mark, as you're pointing out, you know, you don't have to limit this to straight up base pleasures. Later on, he's going to talk about love. You were talking about Catholicism, and I think romantic love. As he goes through the stages, one of them is romantic love, thinking that you are going to complete yourself by finding the perfect romantic partner that you're infatuated with. And he places that squarely within the realm of the aesthetic.

29:43 Mark: Even though the whole premise to this whole thing is, I'm a married man, I made the commitment. You are unable to make the commitment. Well, you might make the commitment, but you might do it wrong.

29:53 Wes: Well, this is what he means by the aesthetic returns. So it's not that he doesn't get to have love and infatuation, but it's that he's committed in such a way that it's not just a passing thing, it's not a whim, it's not something that's going to come and go. And it's a different kind of love that can spread out over time. Right. And that's one of his big claims, is that the institution of marriage and the commitment to that can actually preserve love in a way that simply giving in to an infatuation cannot, is just fleeting.

30:24 Dylan: This time element is where it constantly being active is. So I think this is a way in which the word choice doesn't embody that time element so easily. It still feels like it's, oh, I made a choice to do X, Y or Z. But the way we've been talking about it, I think, is the way Kierkegaard is emphasizing it, that it's really a constant Choosing not in the sense of I'm going to choose one thing, I'm going to choose another, I'm going to choose another and choose another. But the thing that you're choosing is over a time element that then becomes the sort of through line in those ethical choices that one has made. Your way of living that gives integrity to what you're doing. So that that way of choosing it was what matters.

31:11 Mark: Right. And it's not just that the successive choices, their consistency over time show that you're not whimsical and that you're consistent, but that this initial choice of the ethical puts in a frame all those future choices as being a consistency and not as being merely aesthetic, because you could, as an athlete, just. Well, I still find that beautiful. I still find it beautiful. Still find it beautiful, you know, but that's still not right.

31:34 Dylan: There is this kind of tension and maybe we could talk about this more maybe next time. I guess because you said the end of this, which I haven't read, reminded you of the ethics, Nicomachean Ethics,

31:44 Mark: I should say, just in his list of topics. I don't know, we might be disappointed if I.

31:51 Dylan: It does make me think about is. It is in tension with the notion of habit. So what Kierkegaard is talking about feels like this sort of very. We were talking sort of positively about it. Well, it's a very active way of living. You're constantly choosing. But there's also something kind of fundamentally exhausting about it, right. If you're constantly reasserting and actively choosing, rather than saying, you know, I got through this, this is the way I'm doing it. And then, contrary to a kind of Aristotelian virtue of habit that you cultivate the excellences which are truly excellent, and then they become just a matter of your being, a matter of the sign that that activity is successful is that it's no longer active choosing in the sense that you feel it active.

It becomes more like it becomes your way of being. The fact that those choices are so infused in your soul is revealed by the fact that you're not actually having to engage choosing anymore. That doesn't seem to be part of it. For him, it's always, always a struggle for everything, all the time. It's like, for him, life is like being an alcoholic. You're always an alcoholic and you're always going to have to be constantly fighting not to drink, not to take that drink every time, which makes it seem very Christian in this respect. You're constantly.

Because we're always Fallen. And we're always going to have to be fighting from having been fallen. That's what I see in the future.

33:23 Mark: I mean, on the one hand, I had read that quote from later about once you choose the ethical, you have this deep sort of peace, and so you don't strain after gnats and things like that. But on the other hand, we still didn't really get to talk about this despair as a. This is what all this is edging toward, right? You choose these things that are not under your control as your values. And this shows, as Wes said early in his summary remarks, that you're not just in despair when you lose that thing, when you get betrayed, but you were always in despair. The despair is sort of the original sin of this whole thing. And he goes through these. I don't know why you're calling stages, Wes, as if they went in a row. I just was looking at them as sort of case studies.

34:03 Wes: I like to think of this in terms of cancer, like explicit despair. That's stage four, aesthetic. Stage one. Aesthetic is what he calls fully metastasized. You find a condition of enjoyment that's outside of the individual. Could be wealth, could be honor, could be falling in love. The second stage is talent. You might say, well, actually, I'm not devoted to these externalities. I just want to perfect my talent as an artist, as a writer, as a philosopher, as a business person, as a lover. I'm really concentrating on myself, on unfolding that talent, on refining it. But you still don't have control over that. Whether you're talented, that's not something you can determine. It's not something posited by the individuals, the way Kierkegaard puts it. So that's no good. You're still dependent on this externality.

34:52 Mark: It could still be taken away when you lose your arm in the car crash and you can't play drums with two arms anymore.

34:58 Wes: But even if you get lucky, you're still.

35:00 Mark: Def Leppard shows that that doesn't work. You still. You still could still play drums.

35:04 Wes: And then stage three is this idea of quote unquote, living for desire. So you're no longer focused on the object of desire per se, but you live to refine your desire. This gets us into the example of, well, you need all this wealth and power if you want to live like a Epicurean, essentially, which is what he'll call it later on. You need all this money and power. You need to be in Nero to really, really do it, to really do that. And then he'll Accuse a. Of having kind of an inward version of this, an imperial desire, which is unclear on how he's relating that to Nero.

If we could, if we had time to discuss it, it might become clear. But that's where he goes into the Nero example, because he wants to give us this limiting case of what do it mean to have to be able to have access to everything you want to fulfill, to live for desire, which is to say, just being able to fulfill any whim, any desire at any time. And his idea is that that would be quite unfortunate if you did have the fortune, the money required to do that. But even people who don't. And he's going to say, why? But even people who don't have that money, they fantasize about that.

And they say, oh, if I just had the money, if I just had this, if I just had that, then I would be happy because I would be able to live the life of desire. So the whole Nero thing is an exercise and trying to refute that very typical idea that people have. What does the omnipotent man look like? They're a tyrant. Right. Think back to Plato. Living by desire is not freedom.

36:36 Mark: You're a slave to your own desires.

36:38 Wes: Yeah.

36:39 Mark: All right, so what's the last. The last stage?

36:41 Wes: All right, so skipping all over the Nero stuff. Nero's nature is that he's depressed. So the big realization there's. Is that Nero's depressed, you're depressed, You're. In a way, you're just. You're kind of like a Nero. And there's a long, beautiful psychological analysis of Nero. And then we get on page 188 to 189, he wants to tell us what the nature of depression is. And he'll say it's basically a repressed impulse to mature spiritually. Your spirit wants to mature, it wants to move forward, but it's getting stifled. And that's what leads to depression. Really. Actually fascinating in light of psychoanalysis. He talks about the unconscious here. Anyway, I feel like I'm getting very synoptic because these stages go on for a while.

37:23 Mark: But, yeah, the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then depression sets in. Yeah, depression is a sin. A sin that stands for all. The sin of not willing, deeply and inwardly. It's the mother of all sins.

37:40 Wes: Yeah. So the sin of not willing. There really is something to that, though. I guess. We wanted to talk about this saying, it's your fault if you're depressed.

37:50 Seth: But yeah, I'm not a fan of that.

37:52 Mark: I mean, earlier saying depression is the. Is unconscious despair. Right. So that was the question of can it. Can it be your fault if it's unconscious? I mean, for somebody like Sartre, yeah, you made sort of a primary existential choice, in this case, the choice not to choose. And so there's. Thereby you are responsible for this underlying mood that you have. Even if you did not say, I really want to be depressed, you have chosen a path that leads you to that, but somehow it provides you. So this is just to get us a little bridge to what we'll talk about next time.

As we said early in this discussion, somehow the ultimate in despair leads to a way out somehow. So if you're despairing over one thing, right, I really wanted to be married to this person and that didn't work out. And so now I'm crushed about that. I really had this one goal and now this has been. I failed or it's been taken away from me. Really depressed about that. That's not enough. That is merely despairing esthetically. Whereas a full body despair of everything. So if you really. If you were the Nero, you're the old Nero, oh my God, you've had all the pleasures there are to have.

And then you'd be like, well, what is it all for? And that's exactly the point where the ethical choice, you know, where transcendence, where transfiguration of the self would come in and lift you out of this.

39:14 Wes: Right. Page 206 is a good. We'll just get a quick quote. It is an earnest and significant moment when a person links himself to an eternal power for an eternity. When he accepts himself as the one whose remembrance time will never erase. When in an internal and unerring sense, he becomes conscious of himself as the person he is. And yet one can refrain from doing it. So this is a point where he's saying life isn't in despair. I think you kind of dig into the despair until you're lifted out of it by this connection. The only solution is the connection to God is what it sounds like. Right.

39:49 Mark: So you actually want to despair. He has a long section where he's telling you, but you. Not the flabby kind of despair. Despair as an act that takes all the power and earnestness and concentration of the soul. So don't. Yeah, don't despair with a particular despair in general.

40:05 Seth: The. The irony here is that the aesthetic phase where you can despair over gnats, you can't distinguish about between what's important to despair over and what's not is ultimately there comes a point maybe at which you recognize that you need to despair or you despair of your despair. And maybe that's the beginnings of self awareness and that self consciousness that is lacking in the aesthetic. So it's only through despair that the aesthete is somehow drawn out of him or herself into a reflective state that will ultimately make possible blah, blah, blah.

40:42 Wes: Well, I think you come to understand your lack as you're deluded about what you're missing. This is another very existentialist thing, right? Like the lack in Beauvoir and Sartre. It's the God shaped hole, as Mark likes to put it. And you think all these other. These externalities are going to work, but only God is.

41:02 Seth: I thought it was the God key, the Jesus key and the God shaped hole, right?

41:07 Wes: He'll say, when I choose, absolutely I choose despair. Well, first he'll say, choose despair. Because despair itself is a choice. When I choose absolutely I choose despair. And in despair, I choose the absolute. For I myself am the absolute, I posit the absolute, and I myself am the absolute. Is that really what he's saying, or is he attributing. Now I'm confused.

41:29 Mark: I don't know.

41:30 Wes: Is that the position he's critiquing or is he. That's what he's.

41:33 Mark: I think that's what he's claiming.

41:34 Wes: I guess we're gonna clear this up next. Next time.

41:37 Mark: Yeah, but it is the transition point, you know, what Dylan was saying earlier about being like an alcoholic is that the despair actually becomes sublated in the healthy choice. So that like, despair is always there, sort of leaking on the edges, that you have to keep making the choices, keep in the ethical mode, lest you let depression back in. So this is one of the puzzles for me going forward is as. As I read the part about, oh no, you have this deep seated peace. You've now entered the realm of the ethical. You know who you are, and so that gives you the stability.

But on the other hand, it came to pass from a pathway of despair that you now are in a position to reflect on and remember. And. And it is a part of you. It is part of what you are supplanting. You know, he actually is being a Hegelian in saying the self develops out of its past self as opposed to just, you know, flittering this way and that, like a romantic would. So. But you have to go through the romantic stage to be the ethical, I think, right if you just were raised an ethical person, then you haven't chosen the ethical. You're just some little rule following subman.

42:49 Seth: Yeah, I think you're right again. I think the question is whether you can read this as developmental or if it's some sort of, like. I mean, you could presumably go through this stage in the wink of an eye. Right. If you were at the appropriate point. It's really about characterizing where people can get stuck in their moral development. I'm not sure that there are any people quite like the pure aesthete of Kierkegaard's characterization, but he's talking about stages. He's doing a Hegelian move in discussing the stages that a consciousness goes through or must go through, even if it's done, you know, even if only to.

To discard them. And perhaps there were, you know, paradigms of the aesthetic personality that were, you know, that he was referring to in his time. That would have been more obvious to. Again, I don't know. But anyway, it'll be interesting to see. I just get a sense, having also not read the next 50, 75 pages, whatever it is, after this, I would be shocked if the outcome is some kind of happy state. I just don't get the sense that Kierkegaard, even if you end up doing the right thing or the ethical thing or the moral thing, you're going to end up actually being happy about anything.

44:05 Wes: Well, this is the Judge, though, so that's true.

44:08 Mark: That's true.

44:09 Wes: And it does sound that. Based on my skimming the rest meaning not Kierkegaard. So the Judge might. We have to take everything the Judge is saying with a grain of salt. And of course, there's like a huge scholarly debate on how much of a grain of salt and how much of this is Kierkegaard's considered point of view. And how much of this is just ironic, how much of this is something that Kierkegaard would actually critique from the standpoint of faith. Right. We're only in the second sphere. The third sphere is faith. The ethical sphere is not. Oh, faith is not Kierkegaard's final stage. But we are already getting what looks like faith here, which is confusing. Right? We're getting this. It seems like you got to hook up to God in order to be free. God is the freedom catalyst.

44:51 Seth: So, no, I'm laughing because the Judge is talking about, oh, you know, the despair of the aesthet, you know, if you were married and had kids or whatever. But I get a sense of. I Get a taste of despair like this too. It's like there's going to be another level of despair. And I have this sense that this faith is not going to be some kind of like Dante and, you know, like sitting at the right hand of God in the ring of angels, whatever, singing hallelujah for all eternity.

45:20 Wes: If someone sent me 150 page letter with this level of sophistication, and they're not even a philosopher.

45:26 Mark: You are right.

45:31 Wes: They're just one of my family members. And they're just trying to get me to get married. And instead of just nagging me, the next family, why aren't you married yet? I get 150 page philosophical letter. Yeah, I would think, okay, what the fuck is wrong with this? Are they actually happy to be married?

45:49 Mark: A little bit of a busybody. Is the judge all right? So we kept calling him the judge. And if you were thinking of Blood Meridian through this, so were we.

45:58 Wes: Sorry, that's my fault.

46:00 Mark: And. And I like this idea of Seth. You know, you might have gone through it, the aesthetic stage swiftly. I mean, who acts like the aesthete Moody, not know really knowing who you are? Depressed. It's teens.

46:16 Dylan: That's right.

46:16 Mark: So that like is the. So the poet. Existence is a stage of arrested development according to Kierkegaard. It's. You're acting like a teenager even though you are 20, 30, 40, 50 years old.

46:27 Wes: Yes, but there are adults who do this. I just read the Erik Erikson's analysis of Hitler. I know I've been talking about the Hitler thing a lot, but basically analyzing him as. As someone arrested in adolescence, that German nationalism and all of it, it's. There's a very adolescent quality to it. And I think he's exactly right. So people do, you know, especially in the political realm, being arrested in adolescence has huge political implications.

46:54 Dylan: I can't think of anybody else that is like that.

47:01 Mark: And with that. Thank you so much for listening. Come back for more Kierkegaard next time. Good night, everybody.

47:07 Dylan: Good night.

47:08 Seth: Good night.

47:09 Wes: Good night.