Ep. 332: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Ethical Self (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 332 is something like what is an ethical way of becoming yourself? And we're continuing our treatment of the essay by Soren Kierkegaard, the Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the personality, from volume two of either or, published in 1843. More information about this book in the podcast Please see partially examinedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with but one duty to do my homework for this episode

0:38 Seth: in Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin having intercourse, getting pregnant and giving birth with Byron to myself in Austin, Texas,

0:46 Wes: this is Wes Alwan having lost faith in the callous common sense of the esteem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan

0:52 Dylan: Casey concretizing my actuality in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Mark: All right, so we are continuing our discussion for from episode 331, which was still the same essay, which is a rather long essay that was mostly the negative. I wanted to focus this time on the positive, not just critiquing romanticism, critiquing shallow ways of not actually committing to anything and not being a real self. We've gotten plenty of that. But positively, what does he really mean? To choose yourself in your eternal aspect or something? Do we want to kind of, before we dive into the quotes, what did you guys make of this as a concrete project? Can we just lay out right at the top? What is he actually recommending we do?

1:37 Seth: Be intentional and active in choosing to manifest our self and our choices about who we are and what we do.

1:46 Mark: That's definitely got to be part of it. Can we describe. Maybe I. Even the question was misleading because I'm asking for a practical take, which is, you know, I was hoping to get out of this.

1:55 Dylan: Well, his practical take is work for a living, get married and have friends.

2:01 Mark: Somehow a different, a metaphysical way that you're in doing this, you're doing it in a certain way that distinguishes you, even if from all outward appearances. Somebody who's doing it wrong could do all those same things, but you are actually fully engaged in it in a way that the aesthete, even if the aesthete sort of pretends and does these things, the aesthete is never going to, for instance, be a real friend because they're always. At least one of the ways of being an aesthetic. One of the ways of doing it wrong is too much irony. As we were saying in a previous episode that you laugh by yourself. As he says, this is how he sort of concludes the whole essay is. I just want to ask you, friend talking to the guy from the first book, a. Do you laugh by yourself? In other words, do you laugh at us? I think was part of it when we are not around.

2:46 Wes: You know, I think Dylan is right, that the practical upshot of this is pretty simple. It involves the judge, the married man, telling a young man that he should do the same and stop laying about the house dreaming about being an artist or whatever he's doing. But the question is, how do you get there, right? How psychologically do you get to the point where you can make a decision to do those things? And it sounds like you need a long. At the very least a long letter, which. It's philosophically sophisticated, but it's also, I think, meant to be therapeutic in a way.

It's more literary, it's more psychological. And it proposes a method that involves this excerpt, you know, what he calls an exhortation to despair. So I think maybe. Maybe we should think about the practical upshot in terms of not just the kind of end result or what it looks like from the outside, because from the outside, it looks pretty boring. It's, you know, again, it's just someone working and getting married and having friends. But what is the psychological transformation that has to take place before those things become what they are to the ethical person?

Because what marriage represents to the judge, for instance, is something very specific, and it makes it sound great. You should get married if your wife is the thing that makes time make sense. For instance, that's a particular way of looking at marriage that is important to being able to do it successfully. I think on the judge's account, I

4:11 Dylan: don't know if this is saying how you get there in practical terms, like we're trying to get to. If I were to sum it up, I would say Kierkegaard is saying, be rooted in the finite and oriented towards the infinite. His project of trying to bring, you know, actualize the personality through finite concrete action. But it's always directed towards the infinite. So he's trying to resolve this paradox of the infinite and the finite in a person's soul. And he considers the aesthete as being not sufficiently grounded in the actual world. So that even if they're superficially directed towards the beautiful or the infinite, it's insufficient.

And the other aspect of it is it's always active, it's action. So you have to be actually moving. He has a long section in there about teleology and his critique of the aesthete regarding beauty is that their notion of beauty is just static rather than involving an actual motion and activity. So the unity of the universal manifest through the finite, is one of constant action.

5:24 Mark: He talks a lot about bringing together the particular and the universal that you want to live, of course, in your particularity, but you also want to live as an example of the general type human, I guess so whether this is another way of saying, aiming yourself toward the infinite. But I was thinking, and, you know, we kept expecting Kantianism to come up here, and he does not explicitly discuss Kantian philosophy. There is sort of an assumption that, you know, basically what Kantian ethics amounts to, which is, everything that I'm going to do, I'm going to consider whether this could be universalized.

I'm going to live as if I were a member of the kingdom of ends, as sort of a universal citizen. And so is there a way, I think Kant does not explore, at least in the ethics that I've read, like, what it feels like to do this. Because Kant is concerned with just what the ethical is. Let's figure out a priori what the ethical is, you know, and is not concerned. Since he's very against getting ethical truths from experience. It would not be relevant to Kant, prima facie to say, like the judge is doing in this paper, I live according to this way. That's so much more satisfying.

That's sort of beside the point for determining at least that it is moral. For Kant, maybe he has more to say about, once you know what is moral, how to be this, you know, but this is what Kierkegaard is exploring. So by saying, I'm going to live as the universal, some of it is just adding meaning to what you're doing. That if you can say, I guess this is a question to you, does it make it more meaningful? Right? So you have a talent, for instance, this is the work section. And you as an aesthete, you might just be like, I should cultivate this talent.

You know, it might cease to amuse you. You might kind of get burned out on it. You're again, sort of fluttering around. But once you do it under the aspect of human beings have the duty to cultivate their talents or something like this, then it becomes a project, even though it's you positing it, it sort of becomes transcendent, right? It becomes something to guide your life, something external to your immediate whims that you can then track along with. And so therefore your life has meaning, even if you're doing exactly the same thing that you might do otherwise.

7:32 Wes: I think in the case of work, it had something to do with, right, the concept of difference. So you live universally because you think of what you're doing as just a human thing. It's not that I have a talent. I'm better than other people. This is what he means by difference. I'm distinguished from other people. I have an important difference from other people. And my concept of work is wrapped up in developing that talent, developing the thing that makes me different from another person. Whereas on his concept, everyone has their work. Everyone in a sense, in a deep sense, accomplishes the same thing by doing their work.

And to be the universal. You know, Mark, as you were pointing out to live that way, it's a way of thinking about what you're doing. And this is where I think Kierkegaard is very psychologically spot on. This is part of what I find so impressive about him. He's accusing the aesthete of being kind of wrapped up in pride. Or I think the aesthete thinks. He's probably thinks his work is the only thing that gives life meaning. Being an artist or being a philosopher, whatever it is, it's more important than getting married. Getting married and having a regular job or just boring things.

And he's involved in the only thing that could give life meaning. And it's something that's just not available to most people.

8:48 Dylan: I was just going to add that it allows accomplishment.

8:51 Wes: I think the judge would say, you know, you could continue to do all that, but, you know, if you're in within the ethical, you'll look at this all differently. And I imagine he would probably accomplish more, even though I don't think the judge really says that. But I wonder how much A is actually accomplishing.

9:06 Seth: I think there's an element here too, of the jump to the ethical is not a jump to meaning from no meaning, as Wes just pointed out, or from judgment to no judgment, because there is the judgment in the aesthetical. The aesthetes of beauty. I mean, I think he talks about in the first section we read about the categories, essentially history and the categories of good and evil aren't available to the aesthete. So to work is just to work, but to work with purpose and to judge that that work is good and that that work is your own. You know, he uses the term calling later on.

There's a value associated with the ethical, associated with the notion of choice. And I put in parentheses in one of the comments in my notes about authenticity. This is kind of the introduction of the idea of living an authentic life, which involves identifying a calling which has a teleology associated with it, which connects you to the future, which then allows you to develop a project which you judge as not just good, but your own in the capital existential sense.

10:14 Mark: I think you're right. It's not that it adds meaning altogether, it's that it adds consistent, reliable meaning. In the part three of the last episode that Wes and I did, we talked a little about the section on mystics and how you think that for Kierkegaard, he would like mystics, that they want God, they want to be hanged, but they treat God as something elusive, like. Like a feeling that I'm just. I'm just waiting for the feeling of oneness, of God to come over me. And when it's not there, I'm longing for it. And it's just, you know. So it's not fundamentally different than the young girl that he keeps bringing up who has fallen in love for the first time and puts all of herself into this person who is courting her.

And, you know, if he turns out to be a jerk or he's unreliable, then she's just screwed. And so you could be an artist in the aesthetic mode, you know, very talented artist, but still like sort of waiting for the muse to hit you. And then if you. Something happens, you know, your dead poet society, your dad won't let you be in the theater, you break your piano player and you break your fingers or something, then you might want to just kill yourself. And that is an unreliable way of having meaning in your life. That this is sort of a. Maybe slightly less passionate, but it's a more consistent, you know, having a task in front of you that you feel, you know is your calling is a much more steady way to live than waiting for the muses.

11:35 Seth: Yeah, not just consistent and steady, but contiguous. The suggestion is that the aesthete does not have a continuous identity over time, but the ethical person does.

11:45 Dylan: This continuity, the motion, activity of the ethical, that's the constant work of. I guess I might be not saying exactly that Kierkegaard would say it, but manifesting the infinite in your finite actions through their direction. I think, as Mark pointed out, you wouldn't superficially necessarily see the difference between someone who was ethically acting and someone who was aesthetically acting, necessarily.

12:13 Wes: I think part of our problem here is that despite the fact that we read these very practical sections is that, you know, he talks in. In these very abstract terms, even though he claims not to be a philosopher. About this choice of oneself. I don't know. This kind of brings us back a little bit to page 216. I don't know if we are going back that far, but I don't think we talked about it in the last. The last time. But this idea of a kind of absolute choice of oneself that it's what he calls infinitely concrete. And the way he describes it, it acknowledges the fact that we have a history, a painful history.

It acknowledges the fact that we're connected to the human race. He just says the race, but I presume he means the human race. And it seems to throw us back into a kind of radical isolation and individuality. But apparently it is kind of the thing that connects us to the whole, you know, and then we get this idea that despair turns out to be a. I didn't do a great job of describing that other part, which is partly because it's so abstract. But this despair that he had been talking about turns out to be a kind of repentance. And, you know, I think the upshot of the conversation is that our despair is over the finite self.

We give up on the finite self in favor of the infinite self. I don't think that's a phrase that exactly. That he uses in favor of the self that is absolutely chosen and universally valid.

13:39 Mark: Yeah, I'm just to reiterate that made a little clearer.

13:42 Wes: Right.

13:42 Mark: The external infinity is. I have infinite possibilities. I could be anything. That's the bad kind. That's the aesthetic kind, the inner infinity. So this is on 2, 16. The self he chooses has a boundless multiplicity within itself in as much as it has a history, a history in which he acknowledges identity with himself. This history is of a different kind. For in this history he stands in relation to other individuals in the race and to the whole race. And this history contains painful things. And yet he is the person he is only through this history.

This is why it takes courage to choose oneself. For at the same time, he seems to be isolating himself most radically. He's most radically sinking himself into the root by which he is bound up with the whole. So what do you make of that? Is there any reason to call that an inner infinity as opposed to just. I acknowledge my facticity. I acknowledge that I am concretely part of the. How is that infinite still? How is this an embrace of infinity?

14:37 Dylan: I don't know. I mean, I think he's pointing at a notion of transcendence beyond our finite selves, beyond our particularities. And he's formulated in Terms of grabbing a hold of the infinite. And I think the moment that you say, well, what does it mean to actually grab a hold of the infinite? I think you're just like, down some cuckoo land. So I don't even know what it means at that point, except to interpret it in the way in which all these guys interpret it is a way of talking about the transcendent. They're trying to join our particulars into our transcend out of our specific selves, to give it motion throughout time, to lead towards something outside of our finite lives, to justify our mortality on the basis of us being in touch with the immortal.

It's giving meaning to ourselves and to our lives by saying that our mere meaning in our lives, in the particular time and place, is not sufficient. And Kierkegaard believes that too. He thinks that our lives are worthless unless they are connected to the infinite, connected beyond ourselves. That we are immortal in some way. That's our justification. But the twist for him is doing that through our finite selves. But in the end, that's the only thing that the infinity means we're worthless in our. In our finite lives.

15:52 Seth: I don't know that it's that we're worthless because he does connect it to the social. And so there's a sense in which, you know, he talks about. This notion of the infinite is about aspiring to some universality, as Mark referred to earlier. And this aspiration towards the universal is what it means to connect with the social, with the outside world, and to not just be wrapped up within yourself. So, again, the jump to the ethical from the aesthetic has something to do with acknowledging the existence of other beings to some extent in your project. In the project that is you. As opposed to just dilly dallying around in your own set of concerns.

16:37 Mark: Yeah, expanding the circle of concern a la Frankfurt.

16:40 Wes: So part of this is about freedom, right? You despair of the finite self. That is just what it means to choose the absolute self. You despair of the empirical self, which is just of the essence part of you, in favor of the existence part, to put it in existentialist terms, the part that's just a billiard ball being knocked around by the deterministic forces. That's the part in which you stop investing all your energy as if you could control those things when you can. But to, you know, the absolute self and its absolute validity, that's just the part of you that is free and, in a sense, above that world.

But I think unlike a lot of other philosophers, except maybe Sartre, he gives really Interesting psychological accounts, what it means to embrace the point of view that he's embracing. So one of them involves repentance. Right? And repentance not just for oneself, but for, he says, for one's father. So he says he learned this not just from books, but from the nursery. And then he describes this is on page 217, a scene in which he's looking at his child and he's thinking, no matter how much I try to benefit this child, I will probably have a bad influence on him, who will probably be damaged in ways that are caused by my behavior.

But the one thing that I do know is that he can basically repent for my sins as well as his own. He can. In the moment that he chooses himself, which is the maturing moment, he can transcend that sort of damage.

18:13 Mark: So you can break the cycle.

18:15 Wes: Yeah. So all other love in comparison to repentance is but children's babbling. Yes. I think there's a deep psychological account here. But how do you understand it if you haven't experienced? If you haven't experienced. You know, Christianity is a big part of this. It's the true expression of repentance. Will say, so if you haven't experienced that, as I haven't, then despite the psychological account, maybe it remains a bit hypothetical or abstract.

18:40 Mark: If you're going to be a compatibilist and say I can be responsible for something, even though I am technically determined by my character, by my facticity, then you might as well take responsibility for more than just you. You might as well repent. You're apologizing for all the wrong things that your ethnic group did in oppressing other ethnic groups to modernize this. We saw this in Dostoevsky talking about. It's what Jesus supposedly did. He is taking on all of our sins. Well, you can do that. You can stretch your circle of concern and thus what you can say you're responsible for and what you can apologize for, what you can repent for to beyond the actions that you chose with deliberation, your own facticity, even going back to your parents. Original sin.

19:28 Seth: Right.

19:28 Mark: This is how he puts it. This sounds like the worst philosophical idea, Original sin. Right. Certainly Nietzsche has no truck with it. But if you think that we have this capacity to expand the circle of concern and repent for more than us, then why not just sort of generalize the past facticity of humanity and the things you'd want to change about that and call it original sin and say all of us come with this baggage that we individually, through our choice, have

19:53 Dylan: to atone for when you use the word atone, do you mean to invoke all of his discussion of duty, that the manifestation of duty is really atonement in the way you meant?

20:04 Mark: I'm not sure how to put the word repentance as he uses it together with duty, but I think that's a perfectly acceptable way of doing it. I mean, you do your duty anyway, even if you weren't repenting. So I'm not sure if that is the thing that repent. It seems like repentance is more of an attitude than an action, but it certainly leads to those actions, right? It puts you, you're. I'm on the right track, so whatever crap came before, I'm making up for that, right? Is that the idea?

20:29 Dylan: Yeah, I think so. In this section he begins linking up repentance with love. And I think, you know, of course, this is tied up with Christianity and how that move and the importance of love and Christianity. And he doesn't spend a lot of time in this essay articulating those specific things. He just points to them, as far as I can tell. But when you use that word atone, that made sense to me. But it made me think about the 50 pages on duty that he wrote,

20:57 Mark: which we should get to. What I'd suggest going into this was that. Yes, around where Wes talked about, through. About page 228, there's some good discussion of the self. But then he is back on bashing romanticism and with that mysticism section that I mentioned. And then from about 250 up through 268, then he's also talking very abstractly. This is about duty. Directly. From then on, it becomes much more loose and quick to read. And that's the part where he talks about friendship, work and marriage. We've already touched on some of those things. But I think, yeah, we really need to hit hard these theoretical sections for the next 10 pages here. And then 250 to 268, 222 is where I put as a starting point, you know what?

21:44 Dylan: I could honestly use some help with understanding because this section on despair, I still don't understand despair. I mean, maybe I'm just refusing that it's as simple as the weight of the problem of one's finiteness versus wanting to have meaning or have one's life be more than the finite actions of day to day living and connected with the infinite. And that that's the kind of weight and leads to one to despair. I found I Just didn't get it.

22:14 Mark: Wes and I hit in the part three some more of those stages of that, but it would be helpful to sum up. I also, you know, reviewed our earlier episode on the Sickness Unto Death, which is all about. At least half of that essay is about despair. So. Yeah. Can we at least quickly sum up why we are in despair and how being in despair is a necessary. It's not just like something that can happen that we need to avoid, like we're an alcoholic. Dylan, that thing you mentioned last time kept returning to me. Like we're supposed to, through this, make this jump into choosing the ethical. And this hooks us into a more secure mode. So we are not naturally, every time we sort of take a breath, falling back into old. But it could be that, you know, despair is like this original sin. It is something that persists in some form, even through the healthy parts. Right. In our weak moments or something.

23:06 Wes: So in 226 he starts talking about the I don't know if I have a great way to sum everything up without going into the details page 225,

23:15 Dylan: he says, it was said that every aesthetic life is despair. This was due to its having been built upon that which can both be and not be. This is not the case with the ethical life, for it builds its life upon that which to be essentially belongs.

23:31 Mark: Yeah. So it could just be the dynamic that we saw in the Crop Rotations essay of what happens when you base your happiness on pleasures that end up being, at bottom, empty. They end up being either finite, they go away, or you get what you want and you find you're still not satisfied. This sort of cycle of, you know, we saw in Schopenhauer, we saw in Nietzsche that you want something, you struggle for it, you get it, it lets you down, you're pitched back. So this despair might be a recognition that the struggle is never ending, that happiness is impossible if it's based on external goods.

24:04 Wes: On 225, we're thinking about the individual who thinks of themselves in an aesthetic way. And they're focused on this multiplicity, their empirical self with all its different qualities. And then there's the question. He is thinking about what he calls aesthetic earnestness. So it's not just complete, oh, I don't have any values or anything that I want to do, or nothing gives me meaning. It's not nihilism or something like that. But there is the question of which part of that multiplicity you're going to try to grow or you're going to try to nourish into something bigger.

And then he compares that to being a plant, basically, and wanting to develop out of the seed. And then we get the contrast with the person who sees, and this is in the 226, sees things ethically. And the difference is that they're looking at things in terms of good and evil. I think the way we're to think of this, I think we're thinking about two different systems of values. I think all of us probably, and know, because we're not, that we're not religious. I think this is aimed at us. We still have a system of values, but it's not grounded in this religious distinction between good and evil.

It's not grounded in the same way it is even for the ethical man under Kierkegaard's account. So what does that mean? What does the transition into good and evil mean exactly for Kierkegaard?

25:22 Mark: I mean, having just reviewed Nietzsche on this, like, it seemed like it was a good thing to not be demonizing. One half of the equation that the good for the ancient peoples was, you know, what we are is the positive assertion. Values and bad was just like, well, it sort of lacks that. But that doesn't actually say, don't do that. That doesn't actually really orient you. You might choose, if you sort of think of it as there's high fashion and then there's like, bad is the sweatpants and whatever, but you still might want to wear sweatpants sometimes.

Whereas once you make this switch to no, no, good is what we're comfortable with and evil must be absolutely avoided is to be demonized, then it certainly is much more orienting in what you're supposed to do. I don't see why necessarily that switch means that the people in the first category would be in some kind of despair. Nietzsche certainly doesn't make it sound like that. In fact, it's switching so that evil is something we must absolutely avoid at all costs, that you're going to slip into evil, you're going to sin. So you then end up torturing yourself.

You end up being much more person in despair having this category of evil on your back than if you were still in the aesthetic mode. I don't know how you guys feel about my equating the master morality with the aesthetic mode and the slave morality with the ethical, but I was definitely seeing parallels there.

26:36 Dylan: Kierkegaard, I think, is clear that the recognition of good and evil is the lever into the absolute. It's the lever into or the sign of. I don't know if it's the indication or the way you get there, but it's getting to absolute difference as opposed to relative difference, which is the problem of the aesthetic, which is you're sort of mired in this relative difference, which is inconsequential in being rooted in the finite and doesn't allow for continuity, isn't really a choice because you're not making an absolute choice. But I mean, I feel like what I'm saying is sort of saying what he says rather than explaining it so well.

27:21 Wes: This section in particular, he's trying to tell him why aesthetic earnestness can't rescue you. The ideal has always done you harm because you've been hypnotized by staring at it. Aesthetic earnestness cannot cure you. It cannot be accomplished. Ideally. But then he talks about how this aesthetic point of view is seductive. Even at the point where moralizers who rant against evil are really, in a way, just want to be patted on the back. Oh, look at you for giving up these temptations. They betray the fact that they actually want to do the things that they're railing against and they're really out for recognition. And that's not the ethical point of view. And then after that, and this is in 227, he talks about how it's kind of like a low status. The good is boring, right? He talks about the poor end to a story. People don't want to read the story in which only good things happen.

28:13 Dylan: So, yeah, you don't want to read the Paradiso, right?

28:16 Wes: So it takes considerable ethical courage to acknowledge that the good is the highest because one thereby falls into altogether universal categories. Universal categories being an ordinary person, which is to say it's just boring and ordinary to be classed as good. It's sexy to be bad. And it's more interesting from a narrative point of view. And so in a way, the aesthetic person, this is one of their fears, which is that goodness is boring. So I think this is the psychological part of it. You have to address these sorts of fears. Goodness is boring.

Later on it'll be that the ethical gets rid of everything that's beautiful in life, right? The ethical is arid and maybe too rational and too vanilla. And it makes everyone the same. The thing that's interesting about life is people's differences. But once everyone becomes ethical, right, it seems like they just become cookie cutter versions of each other doing the same sorts of things. The variety, diversity is stamped out. Something like that. That's the fear that he's going to try to Cure A of Is there

29:21 Dylan: a way that his essay in this way amounts to saying, look, I know that you really don't want to drive a minivan because it just makes you not cool. But the fact is, is that having a minivan is really, really useful. They get you around, they help you carry your kids around, and you can be helpful and it's super practical and you should just get over yourself and realize that what you ought to have is a minivan.

29:47 Seth: That feels very personal. Dylan, is that why you have motorcycles on the side?

29:53 Dylan: I think minivans are very practical. I've not had one, but I think that they are. But I mean, I was in the way Wes was just describing made me immediately think about. This whole small book is really trying to convince the aesthete that they ought to become ethical. And part of that is, that's why I framed it in that way, is that you're making consequence out of things that are inconsequential. And west was pointing to the kinds of fear psychologically that people have about their differences and the way in which they become boring or they're not outwardly manifesting the way they want to be perceived. And Kierkegaard is in some ways saying, you know, don't worry about that. You don't have to worry about being cool.

30:38 Wes: It's like a Platonic participation problem, but it's the ethical version of it. We don't want to get absorbed into the universal. The universal eradicates concreteness. You know, he's picking up on a concern that goes back to the idealist, and he's giving it his particular twist here.

30:54 Seth: I don't think this could have been written from a place of complete abstraction. I feel like when Kierkegaard was writing this, he had somebody very particular in mind. I'm sure there's some biographical information out there about, but it's essentially a recapitulation of Augustine's confessions, really, when you get down to it. This is the life that this particular individual is living. And this person, the judge, is trying to convince them that, you know, you don't want to be a dissolute, layabout, self centered, egotistical, disconnected, antisocial, smart aleck. You want to engage in the world and engage in the world in some fairly conventional ways because they have those conventions. Marriage, friendship, work have stood the test of time as being ways in which people can fully realize themselves. To some extent. It's a cautionary tale.

31:42 Wes: Obviously, you know, the next step in this, the next psychological concern that the judge is attributing to the esthete is the fear of kind of losing a meritocratic conception of the meaning of life. So this is 228, where the way the aesthete lives, at least the type of aesthete that A is supposed to be. And by the way, this does look a lot like Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard really is lecturing himself, but A thinks of himself. He's like, okay, look, there's most people, that's great. They want to go to the office and be a web developer. I'm sure they had that back then, too.

They want to go do that and live their ordinary life and be married and have kids, and that's great for them. But they don't have my talents. They're not like me. And the important part of this is, on Kierkegaard's account for the aesthete, the meaning of life is wrapped up in that difference. So other people don't get to have meaning. It's just me and people like me. The special Übermensch, you know, the special people. Meaning is built on that difference, not on universality, but in rising above the herd.

32:43 Dylan: I was just going to call out to the Incredibles and Dash's observation that if everybody's a superhero, no one's a superhero.

32:51 Mark: You're right, Dylan. Your minivan example reminds me of a less sexist, obnoxious version of the discussion of the nymph in here, which, in searching this, it's first brought up in page 200 of the essay, where I quote from A. So it's like the judge gets to bring back in A and say, hey, I remember when you made this speech, it was actually about faith. And it was like, do I have faith? Oh, yes, I have faith. I believe that deep in the solitariness of the forest, where the trees are mirrored in the dark waters, in its dark secrecy, where there's twilight even at midday, there lives a creature, a nymph, a maiden.

I believe she's more beautiful than can be imagined, you know, going on about this, you know, so my idea of romance as the romantic, as the aesthete is this goddess unattainable. You know, you really have to be an exceptional person to get this. So, like, 100 pages later, the judge brings this back up. You should get a minivan instead. You know, be married. Don't try to make the nymph your wife, because the nymph is not going to put up with that. You wouldn't even Want to be married to the nymph. Anyway, that's just about an idealized version of romance that's going to flare and then it's going to fade.

But get, you know, something that is dependable, that will ground you. Get a person that you can rely on. You know, if she's wonderfully beautiful, great. If she's much less so, still great. Like, the important is that it is, you know, an honest, connected, good relationship that is not the unattainable nymph.

34:11 Seth: Yeah. Along with wonderful sexism, along with his persistent jabs at the Jews, really makes Kierkegaard a joy to read.

34:19 Wes: Well, you know, again, we're reading the Judge, and in real life, Kierkegaard looks much more like the aesthete. So it is a weird. Always keep in mind how weird it is that Kierkegaard is lecturing himself in this way. He really has to be stepping into a Persona which is quite different from his own. And he didn't get married, and he holed himself up in his apartment and lived off his inheritance and did nothing but write, broke off his engagement. And he's trying to convince himself of things that he did not execute in his own life. And does he fully believe his own argument? Or is there in the faith, in the third sphere that we'll get into next time, in the faith sphere, is there a way to actually rationalize just holding yourself up in your apartment and being a writer and not getting married? Is there a next step that makes Kierkegaard something more than the Aesthete? I don't know.

35:07 Dylan: I did find maybe partly because it was a very, very long section on the benefits of working for a living. He has an aside at one point that acknowledges, look, I don't work for a living, the Judge. And then I felt like, well, it's also Kierkegaard. Right. Because Kierkegaard doesn't work for a living either. And there's a kind of patronizing aspect that's hard to avoid. There's times where it seems just a little, sort of, just so you know, I'm convincing you of something, that I'm in a position that I don't have to do anything I'm trying to convince you of. But still, you should recognize what I'm convinced of now. The character of the Judge is married and the essay.

35:44 Wes: Yeah. And Kierkegaard is dispensing these kernels of wisdom from the standpoint of someone that could only be known by someone who's had the experience of being Married. These deeply rich, interesting psychological accounts of what it means to watch your wife being busy about the house while you otherwise might have kind of slumped into a bit of a depression. And you see her and it lists you out. This is all fantasy world for Kierkegaard. He's pulling this completely out of his imagination, and yet it sounds so convincing and real.

36:16 Mark: I mean, he probably had a friend whose house he went over to, as is. As is described here.

36:21 Wes: If he is not married, it's having a friend is not the experience of being married. Being in that relationship.

36:28 Dylan: Sure.

36:29 Seth: What is it like to be a bat?

36:31 Mark: What is it like to be married, a married person.

36:35 Wes: Johan, I'm writing this thing about marriage. Do you mind if I interview you real quick? I'm going to use it in my thousand page book.

36:44 Mark: You know, he's like any other author, a literary person who has to speak through these other characters and apparently did a lot of people watching. And I'm not sure how his social life was, but he is not purely on his imagination. It is just like any good writer. The dialogue is. Maybe it's things he's read, maybe it's people he's talked to, maybe it's. I'm gonna imaginatively expand and inhabit this character that is based on something I have witnessed. I think it's an interesting question of, like, how accurate could you be about that, Particularly about this.

I don't feel like the sorts of observations he's making about women and about marriage are so deep that you could just never know that unless you were actually in the situation. It is a little like we've talked in the past about the experience of being oppressed. Can you write sensibly about that experience if you have not yourself experienced it? Well, probably if you've, like, read a book and watched TV or whatever in the last.

37:41 Wes: Yeah, that's not what I'm saying. This is a literary masterpiece by a genius. And I know you guys haven't necessarily enjoyed him as much, but this is like Shakespeare or something like that. He is separated. You know, he's making these arguments about difference, but he is different. And yes, all of us have empathy and, you know, we can use our imagination to cross the dividing line and to. That's not. I think you're absolutely right that that's not in and of itself is not an extraordinary thing, and we shouldn't underestimate that. But the brilliance of his account, I think, is something that very few people can do whether they've been married or not. They wouldn't even be able to describe their own experience with that kind of richness and insight and subtlety.

38:24 Seth: I can buy that.

38:26 Mark: All right, in part two of the discussion, we can get a little more into the language he uses to talk about the concrete self and the infinite, to get more into that, as well as get more of the actual details of what is his attitude towards work, what is it about women, about the minivan women that he finds so grounding, and whether this is a legitimate observation we would take today or whether this is just weird sexist talking from his time and friendship. We haven't really talked about either. You know, he even brings up the connection to Aristotle, although he disappointingly says, I'm not going to spend time, you know, talking, getting into Aristotle on friendship like you've spent a lot of time on other things in this essay.

Maybe you could have given 10 pages where you had your Aristotle open and we're talking specifically about that. That would have been nice, but we can fill in some of those details. Thanks for listening. Come back next week. Or if you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, you can get part two right now. Unless you're doing it through Apple, then it's still next week. In any case, you can find out about all the options to do that. Partially examinedlife.com support thanks.