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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode three 332 part two. We've been discussing the latter part of either or the essay Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical and Development of the Personality. And I believe we were up to around page 250 ish.

0:22 Wes: Well, I think we talked a bit about the stretch from 250 to 256 last time. It's the stretch in which he talks about the ethical person not simply being bound to rule, following and external duties, but essentially feeling secure in himself. And it kind of culminates with him saying the person who lives life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses the universal in his life. Thus he who lives ethically has himself as his task is self and its immediacies defined by accidental characteristics. The task is to work the accidental and the universal together into a whole.

And then I think what follows is a pretty dense theoretical account of what that means to have oneself as a task. On 257 he will talk about how the fact that the aesthetic person has no notion of either of the beautiful or pure earnestness of the ethical or the carefree joy of the inconsequential. So this is another jab where he is saying that, you know, your worries about losing beauty are not warranted. And then it's on 258 that he starts talking about repentance and becoming oneself. At this point with this stretch, we get something that starts to sound very, you know, what we think of as classically existentialist.

1:43 Dylan: Yeah. So on 256, he makes this equation between the unique human and the universal human. The ethical individual has completed his task, has fought the good fight. He has come to the point where he has become the unique human being. That is, there's no other human being like him. And he has also become the universal human being. To be the unique human being is not so great in by itself. For every human being shares this with every product of nature. But to be that in such a way that he is thereby also the universal, that is the true art of living.

2:17 Wes: Yeah.

2:17 Mark: How can we understand that? Because it sounds like the universal. Sounds like the generic to me. Unless you want to just get. Well, I'm now seeing myself as God would see me. I'm, you know, gaining my sense of self by seeing myself as a child of God just like everybody else. The ultimate equality of everybody is because we're all equal in God's eyes. Is there a way to not interpret this like that, but yet not make it just merely, you know, insofar as I am the general. Like, why would that give me any possible more value or security or perspective than just seeing my own uniqueness as being important?

2:54 Wes: Well, the universal is about the ethical right. It's about, you know, the fact that we have a shared human nature and that there are certain ethical norms, mandates to which we all ought to adhere. That's what's meant by the universal. And we already, we already talked about this a bit. And the psychological difference between seeing yourself as above the herd or seeing yourself as just like any other person doing a certain task because you're special and you have a special talent. And this is what makes life meaningful versus seeing it as just seeing yourself as essentially human in that this would be the same.

Me writing a book is the same thing as someone washing dishes or performing any other task. It's part of a universal human condition involving effort and work. And you could even call it anything you're calling. But we'll get into that later. But I was trying to kind of launch us into. Is the. The kind of work that's supposed to involved in this task of binding together the universal and the accidental. Right. So your own particular personality, your own particular interests with the more General ethical framework. And I think the first real. Again, I think this really starts with 258.

The person who chooses himself ethically has himself as his task, not as a possibility, not as a plaything for the play of his arbitrariness. He can choose himself only if he chooses himself in continuity. And then he has himself as a multiply defined task. He does not try to blot out or evaporate this multiplicity. On the contrary, he repents himself firmly in it. Because this multiplicity is himself. And only by penitently immersing himself in it can he come to himself. Since he does not assume that the world begins with him or that he creates himself, what does that mean?

4:37 Dylan: The sentence? He does not try to blot out or evaporate this multiplicity. On the contrary, he repents himself firmly in it. When that word repent is in there, it means I'm apologizing for it.

4:50 Seth: So, Dylan, I think what he's saying here is something like. It's a nod to idealism. So when confronted with the multiplicity. So if what you do is hang your hat on your uniqueness or your individuality, and everybody else is unique and individual, there's really no value in you doing that, so to speak. You're not differentiating yourself from anybody. And you're also not finding any connection. You're just focusing on difference and not sameness. If your strategy for encountering the multiplicity and the difference is to try to assimilate it in a way of idealism into yourself, it's just this is all a reflection of me and my consciousness and so forth.

I think that's where the word repent comes in. And it's tied back to his notion that that strategy from an aesthetic standpoint is like misery. It's despair. So the strategy for overcoming despair. There is no strategy for overcoming despair. From within the context of despair. Repentance suggests the ethical right. So that's the strategy that you have to overcome to assimilate the multiplicity as difference and take that step towards the universal. Essentially, it's the thing that starts to get you to move outside of yourself.

6:04 Wes: I think it doesn't become clear except through the whole.

6:07 Dylan: The whole account, the choosing oneself as the way of knowing oneself at the end of 258.

6:13 Wes: I mean, this is part of it, right? So it's going to involve. This task is going to involve a form of self knowledge. But he is very repeatedly in this essay. He's not keen on theoretical knowledge. So this is not a passive, just oh, I'm going to get to know myself and draw up a diagram of the structure of my personality and who I am. It's. He calls it a collecting of oneself, a kind of action, and ultimately it will be a choice of oneself. On 259 he'll talk about a kind of ego ideal, the thing, an ideal self towards which we conceive of ourselves as striving.

And he wants to say, in a sense, it's like a Meno's paradox. It's an ethical version of Meno's paradox, where it can't simply be outside of us, it already has to be inside of us in the first place. So only within himself does the individual have the objective towards which he is to strive. And yet he has this objective outside of himself as he strives toward it. That is, if the individual believes that the universal human being lies outside him, so that it will come to him from the outside, then he is disoriented, then he has an abstract conception.

And this method will always be an abstract annihilating of the original self. Okay, so the universal human being, again, he's thinking here about the universal human is the one defined qua responsibilities and rights and any other ethical conception that you want to have. And as we've pointed out, the aesthete is worried that that's just abstract and bleached of any variety and concreteness and personality. And why would I want to become that right? That's going to annihilate my original self. So we're getting a response to that kind of concern.

But again, the project is how are we knitting together the particular concrete individual and the universal? Because that is the ethical task, to see how we can become rule followers in some sense without becoming automatons, maybe is the way to put it right this.

8:06 Mark: I saw a Kant throughout here. We want it to be universalizable, but yes, we want to be self legislating. So somehow we have to feel like this standard that sure looks like an external standard when you consider it of duty, is yet something that you yourself are generating. And in this case the emphasis is on choosing.

8:26 Dylan: The manifestation of acting is choosing, you

8:30 Wes: know, ultimately, even though he doesn't explicitly address constant maxims, I mean, he alludes to them, I think, at various points. But it's psychologically, again, internally it looks different for Kierkegaard because it has something to do more with, you know, rather than appealing to a maxim. It's a general comportment of the self, it's a self relation, it has something to do with choosing the self or something like that, or ultimately with authenticity. So we're not appealing to this purely rational process of self legislation. There's something else going on. When the individual has known himself and has chosen himself, he's in the process of actualizing himself.

9:06 Mark: Yeah, this might be more maybe the model of choice and sort of. This is. Provides a bridge to Sartre, where the choices that we're responsible for are mostly pre reflective. It's just sort of what your orientation, what your spontaneity is. You take responsibility for that. This is what he's been talking about. You think you might only take responsibility, say you are free for those choices that have been rationally deliberated. But no, you're responsible for. You take responsibility for. You choose your entire spontaneous, including your facticity, whatever it is in your character that made you move this direction.

9:40 Dylan: Yeah.

9:40 Wes: On 260, everything that is posited in his freedom belongs to him essentially, however accidental it may seem to be. Everything that is not positive in this freedom is accidental, however essential it may seem to be. So this essence existence distinction is at work in Kierkegaard. He is very much thinking about the theoretical versus the practical, the deterministic realm of the essence and the material and all that, versus the realm of freedom and how they're supposed to work together. And like Sartre, he thinks that we can choose the things that have already happened to us. We can even choose the damage that our parents did to us. We can choose to take responsibility for all these circumstances that we may seem to have no control over the past.

10:26 Mark: You can't change. But you can say, I'm positing a new line of how things are proceeding through reinterpretation. I can point it towards a vision that I am personally actually choosing as opposed to something that was.

10:40 Wes: Well, you don't just say, I had a terrible childhood and that's why I'm a bad person. You take responsibility for having the personality that you have, even though, yeah, you didn't have control over how it was created, but you can take responsibility for it. I think.

10:53 Mark: But is it as concrete as narratively? I'm going to rewrite the story so that instead of like, I had a bad childhood and that's why I'm a bad person and we'll always do bad things. But I had a bad childhood and that's what gave me the sympathy to be able to do XX and make all these good choices that I'm making now. Now, like that it is literally saying, at least it feels from Your personal good. You are making choices about the future.

11:18 Wes: People like, it makes me think of

11:21 Dylan: eternal recurrence in Nietzsche, that you would live such that you would do what you're doing over and over and over and over again.

11:30 Seth: That seems fair to me.

11:31 Mark: I had been thinking of the amor fati, that. That love of fate thing, but that is focusing more on taking responsibility for the facticity. Whereas eternal recurrence, yeah, it is like feel the ethical responsibility of what you're about to do. However we want to do that. I mean, if you want to use eternal recurrence as a way of thinking that this is going to resound through all eternity, it's very similar psychologically to right now. By doing anything, I'm legislating for the entire universe, which is something that's in Kant that then Sartre also picks up on, even though he doesn't have the categorical imperative. Like there's a right way to do it. But still all these guys are like emphasizing your immense responsibility. What it is to be fully human is to embrace it and not merely float along.

12:18 Wes: In 261 he tells us this is kind of a re stating of the problem, but the task the ethical individual sets for himself is to transform himself into the universal individual. And again, he's trying to allay the anxiety that this consumes particularity and concreteness, that it kind of dissolves in the acid bath of the. Of the universal. And so in 262 at the end of the first paragraph there, every person, if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being not by brushing off his accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them.

But he ennobles them by choosing them. So these particular personality quirks and proclivities and in a way, things that seem to stand outside of the broader framework of the ethical. I can make them essential and make them of something of ethical import. By choosing them and ennobling them. I can lean into certain aspects of myself. So I don't just become a boring rule following person. It becomes maybe a. Well, he talks, you know, in places about energy. It's kind of the way I do it that's important.

13:20 Dylan: Also on page 262, along these lines, the person who has ethically chosen and found himself possesses himself defined in his entire concretion. He then possesses himself as an individual who has these capacities, these passions, these inclinations, these habits. So all the finite concrete stuff and external influences.

13:41 Wes: Very important.

13:42 Dylan: Yeah. Who is subject to external influence, who is influenced in one direction Thus, and in another thus. Here he then possesses himself as a task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control, in short, to produce evenness in the soul, a harmony which is the fruit of the personal virtues.

14:04 Wes: The objective for his activity is himself. The self that is objective is not an abstract self, but a concrete self and a living interaction with these specific surroundings, these life conditions, this order of things, right?

14:18 Mark: And then he's going to get into how this is a social and a civic self. You know, one of the things, I'm not sure this is an interpretation that Kierkegaard would approve of, but I was thinking in terms of making your talents into something universal is by being of use to other people, right. If you just are an athlete about your talents, then it's all narcissistic and it's all, I'm so in love with this artwork that I'm creating and whatever, I'm doing my work. Whereas if you think in terms of whatever your work might be, of it actually being helpful to other people, by being ethical, I'm playing a part in society and I'm helping people, then you can't be so precious about your artworks, right?

It is more, am I bringing about joy and elevation in people through this work or is it just navel gazing bullshit? And it makes your work not so much more lofty. Like by making them a nice meal, you could bring them joy and elevation. By shoveling the snow on their driveway, you can bring them joy. Maybe not so much elevation, but not slipping. I really like that idea of stop being such a pretentious douchebag and be of use to people. That is what the ethical is. But later he wants to de. Emphasize accomplishment. This all has to per our sort of Kantian framework about your attitude.

And the way he's describing it here is about your view, how you view yourself and your characteristics and your work and whether or not you accomplish anything. So he specifically says, you know, later around page 300, about, if you're a writer, don't think about like, how many people is this going to reach? Just do your duty, do your job, you know what the consequences are going to be out of your control. So just like you should not base your desires on, you know, I gotta have all the pleasure, I gotta have all these women, I gotta have all this external stuff.

You should not base it on how much am I accomplishing out in the world should not determine your self worth. It has to be all sort of internal.

16:10 Seth: Yeah, I mean, the notion of Duty already has implicit in it a recognition of service or use. Like there's no concept of duty that doesn't involve some other entity. Right. But as you point out, Mark, you make a distinction between having fidelity to the duty and then having an attachment to the actual outcome. To some extent, like, it's my duty to do this. I'm doing it in good faith. Good. All the language of existentialism is coming here, right? Good conscience, good faith, good intention, whatever. But if you know your calling is to do a philosophy podcast and you never reach 2 million subscribers so that you can support yourself financially, that doesn't mean you're a failure and you shouldn't attach your self worth to it. But at least you're pursuing your calling authentically.

16:58 Wes: So we get another worry here, which is that I can only do the particular. This is on page 263. My particular actions in the world are part of the empirical world. They're embodied, all of that stuff. But what is required of me is universal. What I'm able to do is the particular. So how does that work together? Duty is the universal. It is required of me. Consequently, if I'm not universal, I cannot discharge the duty either. And then he works on again trying to resolve that paradox on 264.

17:29 Mark: Can I throw in here on 263? He throws in this idea that I think he's working through the next couple pages of skepticism about duty, which might be from the aesthetic point of view of why is it worth it? I'm supposed to do this thing. I'm supposed to stand on guard duty or whatever. And I don't think that anybody's going to invade right now. Maybe I should just look at my phone instead of being a good guard. The outcome is what matters. Or you could just be like, my duty is what you know, my society is telling me. But my society is very flawed.

There's probably going to be an election next year. They're going to change the laws. My duty would be something different. You could have all these things that make it so that you see your duty at a given time. Like, I didn't even want this shitty job. I'm just doing this because I need to make enough money to eat here. I should do the minimum. There's all these ways that you'd say, this thing that presents itself as duty is actually not worth doing. And he's going to say, no, it is actually still duty qua duty, sort of. It doesn't matter about the source of it.

And your obligation to do it, even if it's a minor thing, is the same as if you know somebody who has a huge amount of responsibility. You're the president, and you really got to keep your eye on the ball and your finger appropriately situated toward the nuclear button. There's no greater sin on the president's part from not doing his duty than you with your pitile job not doing your duty.

18:46 Seth: Yeah.

18:46 Wes: He mentions two forms of skepticism. One about the laws changing, and then Neil says, you know, your obligation continues unchanged regardless. And then the. The other is the one that I had mentioned about not even being able to discharge one's duty at all. Because, you know, I'm particular in duty is the universal. And this involves this trick of performing the universal and being the universal, even though I am particular. And I think we get kind of resolved in two around 265.

19:12 Mark: It does seem a weird question. Like, really, I was trying to present, like, practical ways in which you could rationalize not doing your duty. But none of those is like, but my duty is supposed to be the universal, and I can only do this specific thing. No human being has ever said that.

19:27 Dylan: I interpreted him as saying in this part of the skepticism is that it will always be the case that there are duties that will resolve into one thing. It will always be clear. He says it will always be possible for him to say what his duty is. It will always be resolvable. And I really wondered about this, that is it true that duty is always one thing, and are there not genuine duties that come into conflict? He seems to really be oversimplifying in this respect.

19:58 Mark: Sartre's example about should I go to war or should I stay home and take care of my mom?

20:02 Wes: The talk of universal in particular is a restatement of the problem of free will. I live in a finite deterministic realm, or, you know, empirical realm governed by natural laws. And the concept of fulfilling a moral obligation. Right. It requires freedom in a way. It requires me to step outside of that into the universal. So I think it is a real problem. I think that, you know, the skeptic can make a very strong case that this concept of morality doesn't make any sense. And that's what Kierkegaard and the existentialists, I think, were working on to some extent, and they are pivoting off, off Kant.

20:37 Mark: But so a practical version of that might be, you say I should do my duty. I take this very personally. Like, I could interpret as, get a steady job, you gotta go into work every day, you gotta do Your thing. And I might just feel like I am not made up. I've tried that. I can't do that day after day. I have whatever disorders going on with me. My deterministic things prevent me from universal. If that's what universalizing duty means. I just can't do that. So I understand that better than putting it in the abstract way.

21:08 Wes: I think this is kind of related because I think this is about the directedness of one's imperative. He doesn't want the imperatives to be directed towards something external. Oh, this is the law. This is the maxim. This is the thing I have to do, therefore I'm going to do it. It's actually directed towards my personality. My personality is the objective, it is the guiding light in some sense. So we'll say on 265 the very moment it is perceived that the personality is the absolute. Well, I hope I'm not going to contradict myself here, but we'll see.

The absolute is its own objective, is the unity of the universal in the particular. That very moment every skepticism that makes the historical its point of departure will be vanquished. And then it talks a little bit about, you know, the worries about cultural relativism, will some societies kill their children for X reason or whatever, you know, example of that you want to give. And then he says, well, actually we can ground morality and something objective and it's the personality. So near the bottom. When the personality is the absolute, then it is the self.

Then it is itself the Archimedean point from which one can lift the world. So something about grounding this, the concept of morality and personality, conceived of as absolute in the sense of combining universal and particular. What does that mean exactly? Well, what do you guys think?

22:28 Seth: He's got a nifty little turn on 264 for I can discharge the duty and yet not do my duty. And I can do my duty and yet not discharge the duty. He's making the turn there where if somebody objects. This is part of the skepticism thread. If somebody objects that duty is universal or that duty is abstract or shared amongst people. What he says is no one ever says I did duty or I did the duty. They always say I did my duty. And essentially the mindness there is the self and the personality piece that you're talking about, Wes. But it's the connection. The duty is the universal. So it's one of those weird, I guess you'd call it kind of paradoxes to some extent, that duty is abstract, duty is universal, and yet its Instantiation is in the particular, which is the person themselves. And the way they do it is through the mindness, the owning of it.

23:22 Dylan: They're dutying.

23:23 Mark: I interpreted this sort of as if you're at a job and it has particular duties, but there might be other things that overwhelm that. Like it is your duty to stay on guard here. Oh, but you get a call and somebody's in trouble and it's also your duty to go and help them. Or it might be that the letter of the law says, how much am I supposed to interfere as a guard? I'm supposed to keep people from getting past this point. If there's a mugging right in front of me, I don't have to do nothing. That's not my duty. So there would be senses in which you don't do the duty of that position, but yet you do your duty by actually stopping the robbery from doing something that's not in your official job list, but that is your duty. So I think that maybe this language is reflecting that Sartre conflict of duty example.

24:10 Wes: So what do we think? I mean, 265 is our last page of theorizing and it culminates in this theory of the personality is the absolute, is its own objective. I mean, is that. Are we satisfied with that?

24:22 Mark: Let's read some more quotes from there that seem crucial.

24:25 Wes: There's not a lot. I mean, there's the part where he wants to dismiss ethical relativism. So, you know, if you bring up a example of savages putting their parents to death, that is not a. An example that shows that there's no such thing as morality. How much, however much the external is changed, the moral value of the action remains the same. You know, so he's anti relativist, but he has a particular way of grounding morality. And I don't know that we get enough here to be able to explicate it in detail because it involves again the directedness of the ethical towards the personality as opposed to towards abstract rules or maxims.

25:08 Dylan: He ties it to good and evil. At the bottom of 264, if I assume that duty is something external, then the difference between good and evil is canceled. For if I myself am not the universal, I can form only an abstract relation to it. But the difference between good and evil is incompatible with an abstract relation.

25:29 Wes: Yeah, this is part of the skepticism that he's trying to solve. Right. Or the paradox he's trying to solve with this concept of the personality.

25:37 Mark: So the opposite is I'm in it. I'M in that relation of good to evil. So I can't just consider it like a math problem. I'm already to bring up this example you keep bringing up Wes Heart on morality or on law I have internalized because good and evil is something I'm legislating. I'm in the game. There's no way that I can just think of them as just oh, they're just opposite poles and they rely on one another. Sort of take this Buddhist external look at the whole thing.

26:05 Wes: This is important. Moral norms can't be external even in the sense I can't come up with a psychological theory where I say oh well, the reason why I don't do X is because I'm afraid of my conscience stinging me. That's my reduction of morality. My conscience wouldn't sting me if I didn't see the norm as authoritative in the first place. So very weird. This is heart's acceptance. There's a really weird thing going on with morality in this concept of acceptance that I think is very hard to spell out. And it's part and parcel of this universal particular problem how I can be bound to and see as legitimate and in a way as self legislated this external norm.

It's really weird. At the bottom of 265 the atheist perceives very well that the way by which the ethical is most easily evaporated is to open the door to the historical infinity. And yet there's something legitimate in his behavior. For if, when all said and done, the individual is not the absolute, then the empirical is the only road allotted to him. And the end of this road is just like the source of the Niger River. No one knows where it is, not yet. If I am assigned to the finite, it is arbitrary to remain standing at any particular point.

Therefore, along this road one never makes a beginning. For in order to start one must come to the end. But this is an impossibility. When the personality is the absolute, then it is in the self, the Archimedean point from which one can lift the world. It is easy to see that this consciousness cannot inveigle the world to discard his actuality. For if he wants to be the absolute in that way, he's a non entity, an abstraction. Only as a single individual is he the absolute. And this consciousness will save him from all revolutionary radicalism.

27:45 Mark: So the opening the door to historical infinity I think is just saying, well, values change over time. You know, where did my values come from? They just were passed down from me. It's just A contingent series. But when you. Just like we were saying before, when you take responsibility and repent from the larger historical infinity, then you are asserting your place. It is not a mere arbitrary which place on the road of history that you are. You're saying, this is the place I'm on. I might be wrong. Maybe on reconsideration, future generations will determine that.

What I think is my duty now actually was very, very bad. But I gotta be where I am and see evil where it lies, given this. So it is a sort of subjectivity, but it's a historically grounded subjectivity about ethics, such that everybody else, at this point in time, considering these things, we could probably all have a discussion and agree what the right thing to do, what duties are in these circumstances. Maybe not every circumstances, or it might be things we'd argue about, but the underlying principles. I think this is what he was saying before, of no matter how much the external circumstances has changed the society that would kill its old people.

Well, that's because probably they had a shortage of food, something like that. So the underlying principle of we want the society to thrive and people to be respected, but the external circumstances could be different in different societies. This came up on, like our Churchland episode a long time ago. That's how you explain historical variability. There really are universal ethical principles that we would all get on board with. It's just that when you look at how to actually apply those in the world, of course it's going to be very different, depending on the circumstances on the ground.

29:27 Wes: He goes on to give a example of his relationship to his father, and then maybe this makes some of it clear. He wants to illustrate, as he says on 266, that the ethical is not a matter of the multiplicity of duty, but of its intensity. So again, he wants to focus us, I think, on the personality or on some single first principle such that we are not looking at a multiplicity of different rules and norms and simply obeying the rules in that sense. And his example is very simple. It has to do with doing his homework. As a child, starting on 267, I had but one duty to do my homework, and yet I could derive my whole ethical view of life from this impression.

And then he'll tell us, say something he said before, which is, it's not the particular rule that's important, but it's the energy that's evoked. And on 268, he'll tell us if the multiplicity of duties advance and the individual is diminished and destroyed. So this is A practical example of the threat of the ethical of abstractness. It's a real threat. It's a threat that will just be rule followers without being invested with what we're doing. And by 269 we kind of get the upshot of this, which is that his father tells him to do his homework, but doesn't monitor him, doesn't nag him about doing his homework, says here's the norm, here's the duty.

It's your duty to do your homework, and that's it. And then he's hands off the it's

30:55 Seth: not your duty to do your homework. What he says is, in three months you need to be the top three in your class or something.

31:01 Mark: How you do it is your business. It's your responsibility. What dick is there.

31:05 Seth: I'm not going to monitor you. I'm not going to nag you. And then he was like, for him, it was like crystal clarity.

31:11 Wes: So I'm very sure, however, that he was very concerned about what I was doing, but in order that my soul could be matured by responsibility, he never allowed me to notice it. Many children are warped by being overwhelmed by a whole ritual of duties. I mean, this gives us a much more concrete picture of what Kierkegaard is on about, a conception of morality, which people are not nagging you about doing what you're supposed to do and not coming at you with a multiplicity of things, and it not being simply about obedience. If you've internalized the norm about doing homework or however you want to define it, then you for yourself to find a particular avenue by which you get there.

What if you've internalized that for yourself? If it's not internalized, if it's just this external imposition of struggle between parent and child. I think that for him is a model of what the ethical isn't or shouldn't be.

32:02 Seth: He's pointing at something really interesting here, which is there's a sense in which we can all relate to the clarity that comes when you're five or six or whatever the age is, and you're given a directive by an authority figure to do something, and that's your duty. Do the dishes or get good grades or clean your bedroom or whatever. It's like there's a kind of unity of laser like focus and understanding of the significance and the point. And I think what Kierkegaard's saying is if you can capture that in your adult life, can you give yourself that sense of clarity and purpose and direct and can you weed out distractions and execute your duty with that level of intensity and focus, then ultimately you'll be successful in accomplishing whatever it is that he seems to think is important. I can appreciate that we get this

33:03 Wes: idea that there's both freedom and dependence. Duty is the expression of his absolute dependence and his absolute freedom in their identity with each other.

33:12 Mark: He just loves those paradoxes.

33:13 Wes: We're not simply slaves to the rules, but be an odd conception of morality.

33:18 Mark: But what's the absolute dependence? I mean that could be like absolute dependence as in causally dependent.

33:25 Wes: Right.

33:25 Mark: I'm asserting this is another statement of compatibilism between free will and determinism. I don't think that's the point because we don't emphasize. Even in taking responsibility for my facticity, I'm not emphasizing that my determinism, far from it. But my dependence, I guess my rootedness in a situation. I mean that's dependence.

33:46 Wes: I mean there's thinking of dependence on God or dependence on the parent. In this circumstance there's a sense in which moral norms they are externalities and I'm not creating them my myself. I choose them without creating them.

33:59 Dylan: Yeah, that last what you just said is the direction that he's going.

34:03 Wes: Right.

34:03 Dylan: Is you're actualizing yourself is choosing those things even if you didn't create them.

34:10 Wes: The dependence is the essence side of things.

34:13 Dylan: I think. Do we make a difference here saying it that way? You choose your life even though you didn't create it. And how it juxtaposes with a more Nietzschean attitude of really emphasizing the creative act. That you have a different relationship to both your facticity and your specific manifestation in the world and in history. And that it's really fundamentally you're living is a creative act that feels like it has a much more radical departure from history than what Kierkegaard is implying.

34:47 Mark: Yeah, I mean he might just be the champion of the aesthete with the elitism that we've described as being part of that.

34:55 Dylan: Yeah. It would make it have made it more interesting in that way to get them both into a parlor room together.

35:02 Mark: So the next section is on beauty here, which Wes brought up earlier that this is a. The athletes like you are into drab duty. You know, Kant is so dry leaving as a duty machine, as an automaton. Ugh. But Kierkegaard or the judge here wants to characterize. No, actually you don't have real beauty, you aesthetes. Real beauty is something. I mean maybe this is like parallel to the argument of you don't have real happiness. Real happiness is something dependable and long term. So let's get a little bit into from an ethical point of view. You find somebody sort of doing what they're supposed to do.

You know, you're seeing them as an example of their type. This goes back to the sort of Platonic or in our aesthetics episodes we've talked about, you know, seeing something fulfilling, its telos or whatever. And that only the ethical person really has a good grasp of what a telos really is so they can appreciate beauty. Whereas the athlete, so he gives an example specifically about the aesthete might be, oh yeah, she was so beautiful, but then she had some hard times and now she's not beautiful anymore. Whereas the ethical person, the judge is saying, I still find that person just as beautiful as ever.

Because I see sort of them as an organism as they are. I'm not comparing them to some semi arbitrary external standard of beauty. I'm looking at their internal functioning and you know, so I see however broken she might be, I see the beauty in it.

36:31 Wes: Yeah, he's going to defeat the esthetes, worry about the ethical depriving us of beauty by turning the esthete's definition of beauty against himself. This idea of an inner teleology. And he'll say, look, teleology implies a goal which implies a kind of movement towards that goal. It's about action, it's about the ethical. You can't talk about teleology without talking about the ethical. And therefore in a way the ethical is the groundwork for the beautiful. So Mark, as you said, you know, you can look at people, you can look at the sorts of beauty that are associated with physical appearance, for instance, or you can look at the real beauty that is associated with their inner teleology as human beings involving the fact that they're human subjects.

37:14 Mark: What I ended that explanation though, however broken she might be, that's what I wonder about, is clearly the ethicist is not seeing the aesthete as particularly beautiful.

37:25 Wes: Right.

37:26 Mark: You're engaged in these despair, these cycles of despair and these self defeating, like it would take an asthete to point at something seriously damaged like that and say, look what a beautiful thing that is like, because it has, you can see the sort of internal clockwork logic of it. It seems the ethicist is going to say only a well functioning individual, a healthy individual, a well oriented individual that's going to be beautiful. So is this a problem that the ethicist is, it seems like they're just redefining which things are beautiful as opposed to, oh, I can see beauty everywhere. I'm the ethicist. Whereas you only see it, you know, in. In fragments and wisps that are unreliable.

38:06 Seth: The ability to see beauty in others and other things is an ability to recognize their history as well as their context and their own projects, as well as their function in your projects. I think that's kind of more to it. It's a richer. In his mind, it's a richer way of viewing and valuing things and people than the estate is capable of.

38:30 Wes: They can be as broken as you like. The beauty is in the struggle, he says on page 275. I do not see the consummation, but the struggle. When I look at the life ethically, I look at it according to its beauty. But then when he goes on, I think even the talk of seeing a woman outside the window and all that, it's really about again on 276, he is bound to be victorious. Of that I am convinced that is why his struggle is beautiful. For fate and the victory of the beautiful, I will struggle for dear life. I don't know how realistic that optimism is, but I think the beauty has something to do with the telos.

And everyone in some way is struggling with respect to it. And if they're the worst of criminals and the worst of the worst of people who fall very short of it, I think the idea might be that they can't help but be involved in a struggle towards it, however badly they are losing it in the realm of the finite. So you can see the beauty of that and yeah, you can see the beauty of people who are. Just because they are trying to. Life is hard, right? And people are trying to work it out and there's something beautiful about them.

39:34 Mark: So I think this well introduces to turn briefly to work, marriage, friendship. I think we've thrown a lot of the elements out of this somehow. We've said, as far as work goes, you don't want to be an elitist about it. You don't want to say that only the geniuses are doing work that's worthwhile. Everybody's sort of what you were just saying, Wes, about that you can find beauty in more places. Everybody has a duty, and doing that duty, make that your task, make yourself your task. So that is sort of the beautiful. That is what the human being is supposed to be doing.

That is our telos. So as long as you can take an attitude towards your work so that it is a Calling, then you're, you're doing it. You know, that's what would make for a beautiful world that would be our kingdom of ends, is everybody is doing their duty. Everybody sees their work as a calling. And it is incumbent upon you as your duty to do something and to consider it as your calling. So it doesn't mean that you have to do whatever drudgery is put in front of you. And this is why I might say we could consider somebody who's stuck in this mind numbing, soul crushing work as tragic in a certain way.

But if they're applying themselves to it, like we could still see the beauty in that. You know, it's just like as if they had any other sort of handicap. The handicap in this case is crushing circumstances that don't actually give them a chance to choose something that would more naturally be a calling. It's sort of, you know, tragic to be not in a position where you could realistically make this coal mining job or whatever that is really terrible. Your calling.

41:11 Dylan: This whole section is where I most felt like Kierkegaard as like this silver spooned prima donna college student and extolling the virtues of owning your work. And of course there's something right about saying, you know, something beautiful about someone owning something like that, but who is he to. Or I won't even say it that way. I'll say it that it doesn't seem like he's hitting the right note about ownership for any kind of work that exists out there at all. I suppose he wouldn't consider being enslaved work. Right. It's a different state.

41:45 Seth: Obviously. If your work is compulsory, then there's no freedom in it. You're not choosing.

41:51 Dylan: There's but isn't everybody's at some level that way, right? I mean, when he's talking about being burdened by work, but working for a living because of the necessity of it, that's not enslavement, right. But it is subject to circumstance in a way that you don't have freedom. Certainly not in the way Kierkegaard had. And he acknowledges this.

42:11 Seth: No, I completely agree. He talks about having the means and having money or having to work for money. And it's not clear to me that it's possible. That's not true. It's not clear to me that it's possible for the majority of people, or even less strongly all people, to make this choice freely in the economic and political and social structures that we have. It's a luxury to some extent.

42:35 Dylan: It's also the case that A lot of people work in order to have a vocation of something else. They work for a living in order to sustain themselves and pay for the things that they actually want to be doing.

42:47 Wes: Right. He has a whole section on that. That's the aesthetic point of view.

42:51 Mark: Yeah, I read him at the beginning of. This is coming down very much against. We have a whole other episode on new work talking with Fritchau Bergman, and we've gotten this in our Marx episode and other things. But how work should be enriching and how toil is a prison. And most of these is, you know, it seems like he's starting that he's just straight up critical of this, that you're being a spoiled aesthete by demanding only the. The only work that we should have is the kind that's, you know, really high skill, high talent. You know, anything else would be unbearable.

And he's saying, grow up. You know, take responsibility for your facticity. Be in the moment. Take things on as your task. Don't just have a job that, like, I want this to be as mindless as possible so I can get through it and then actually live my life. These are all different ways of being in despair. Somehow you have to really come to terms with being in a situation where you have to have a job and not say that, well, anybody that's not super rich or, you know, can afford to do the thing that they love. They're just shit out of luck and they're going to have a shitty life.

We have to have some way to see all of their struggles as not in a condescending way, as also beautiful and equally worthwhile to what you, the artist preening over your work is doing. And it sounds like Dylan, you think that he actually can't get out of this mindset that he is the exceptional artist as Kierkegaard, the writer, to put this forth in the convincing way through the mouth of the judge here.

44:18 Dylan: Yeah, I think that there is something to be said for owning one's work, regardless of whether you're, you know, how connected or how manifestly meaningful it is to you. But. But the circumstances in which you end up. And you're, you know, maybe it's that you're glad to have a job so that you can, you know, take care of yourself and your family and that you're appreciative of. But you know what? Digging egress holes with a shovel all day long and then hauling lumber and carrying stacks of shingles up to the tops of roofs might get old after a while for some people, or that you're going and you're splicing together Ethernet cables for hundreds of feet or thousands of feet of ethernet cable in some big old office building, or you're just trying to talk to some other customer who is just melting your face off. Yet again, I find him pretentious and condescending.

45:17 Wes: Here again, this really is a character. It's the judge. And Kierkegaard much more resembles the esteemed in real life. And it sounds like he's trying to talk himself out of something. And I don't know how, if we're supposed to think that the judge is a little bit, you know, as a representative of the ethical, is a bit out of touch with the whole picture.

45:34 Mark: Can we just say that he's trying to give parallel accounts with these different categories? So I was talking about the marriage as get a minivan of a marriage. You don't have to have a marriage with Angelina Jolie or whatever. That would be too hard to manage. Find a real person or even with

45:51 Wes: someone that you're infatuated with in the beginning, you know, who's just.

45:55 Mark: Yeah, find a real person that you can connect with with, you know, and that will ground you. And so a job should do the same. Find a minivan of a job. You don't have to be the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra or whatever your great aspiration to be, but at the same time, like you could have a marriage that's so bad, that is not a minivan, that it is a. A beater and that, you know, runs out of things fall off it when you try to drive two miles. So I think you're talking about Dylan jobs that would be like that, like, surely so there would be room here.

It's not just like, be a stoic, put up with whatever your situation you're in. It's okay if you're a slave. Be satisfied with what you got. It is. No, we, we need a humane system. But thinking like the, the artist does that a. Whatever the standard is 40, 40 hour a week, 35 hour week job is just too burdensome. And, you know, it seems like he would say, buck up. It works for most people. It can work for you too. Just bear down and have a relation with what you do, where you affirm it, you identify it with you. It's part of your facticity. So you're sort of what, you're repenting in it, you're reinterpreting it.

So see it as your calling. It's okay. You know, I. I'm watching some of those, like, the Downton Abbey kind of things, that Gilded Age right now. And the servants in those. Most of them take a lot of pride in their work. They're really into it, and it's trying to. You know, I think the message of this kind of show is that, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're on the top. In fact, the. What the people on the top doing with their planning their fancy parties is actually a bunch of shallow bullshit. And that actually doing the service and, like, I have a job in front of me, and I'm trying to do it adequately.

Like, that is very noble.

47:33 Wes: Master slave dialectic. Right. Yeah. The slave position is more authentic and, you know, as. Until the work becomes alienated.

47:41 Dylan: Right.

47:41 Wes: I think what Dylan is thinking about is the possibility of alienated labor. And that is. You know, I had the same thought. Kierkegaard kind of circumvents that possibility. He has the judge saying, don't be so full of yourself that you think that work. Oh, work is beneath me unless it's writing a novel or something like that. That's the wrong way to look at work. But, yeah. You know, it doesn't address the problem of maybe being stuck on a factory assembly line. There are certain types of work where you. Yeah. That you can't just embrace, I think.

48:12 Dylan: Well, I think alienating is the right word. And I think you're right to highlight not just the judge as a character, but it's reminded me that, of course he's writing to the esthet. There's a character of the esthete, which I think you guys described correctly as this person who considers themselves above this kind of thing and above engaging in, quote, unquote, everyday work.

48:35 Wes: And they have a trust fund so they don't have to.

48:38 Dylan: Yeah.

48:40 Wes: I mean, the judge alludes to that all the time, and that's the real Kierkegaard was in that position.

48:44 Dylan: Yeah. So in that respect, the thing that I'm reacting to is alongside of, but not really the. The thing that Kierkegaard's. The character that Kierkegaard's or the judge is most engaged with.

48:57 Mark: Since we are basically out of time here, I'm going to just vote that what Kierkegaard has to say specifically about marriage is creepy enough that I'm glad we're not reading it. That what we've just already said about having a spouse of whatever gender, you know, will ground you. And he specifically talks about this in terms of temporality that's probably enough. And also, I think what he says about friendship is pretty shallow and not particularly original. But it's about having shared values. It's not finding the other person entertaining. It's very much in line with what Aristotle said about it. I don't know. Is there anything life shaking?

49:32 Wes: I don't find the marriage thing that creepy. Although when I read things like that, I am always imagining how you're reacting to it. It's impossible for me not to. And what you're gonna say about it on the show. Yes, it's more traditional. It's. That's what you would expect of Judge. Is it Will I forget his name? Is it William? Yeah, A Judge William to say in the 19th century.

49:54 Mark: But I think it's only once in this part of his. Like, he's remembering his dad saying to him, william, do that. Like, I think that's the only time that it comes up that his name is William. Perhaps in the intro. Maybe there's something else I'm missing.

50:06 Wes: But, I mean, he has some very sweet reflections on the meaning of watching his wife working around the house. And even though you can accuse him of being sexist and all that stuff, it's still actually quite sweet. And it's more than sweet. It says something about how people can relate to each other at a level that makes it such a sort of sustained relationship possible. It's about respect, and it rests on some ideas about what femininity and what male and female represent their differing roles in that dynamic that people would object to. To today. So, yeah, if you.

50:41 Mark: If you do a search on the word emancipation, you can. I don't want to take our time.

50:45 Wes: Yes, the Judge doesn't. Is not a fan of the suffragettes and their short haircuts. They're disdain.

50:54 Dylan: Yeah, they're disdained from dresses.

50:56 Mark: All right, well, let's wrap up this essay. Thanks, guys. Thanks, listeners. We are going to next be doing one more Kierkegaard. We want to. I wouldn't be totally convinced. There's so much Jesus or whatever in this essay that I'm not completely sure that he wrote either. Or with the idea of there being this third religious context that overwhelms both of them, we can get into, you know, but it'll be very cool revisiting. So we're going to read Fear and Trembling, which is something that we sort of dealt with as the minor work of our very first Kierkegaard episode, which was mostly about the sickness unto death, a later thing.

But Fear and Trembling is still pretty early, but written from yet another point of view of somebody who is at least more invested in religious development, the religious development of their soul, presumably beyond the ethical, there is a section in this essay called the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical. So clearly this essay at least thinks that there is this is not what we've told in these past two episodes is not the end of story. There are more ways to shout down the aesthete and presumably the aestheticists as well. Well. So please come back for that.

Reach out to us pl at partiallyexaminedlife. Com or through our Facebook page or Twitter or whatever to tell us what you'd like us to cover, to give us any feedback on the show. We love you. Good night.

52:12 Seth: Good night.

52:13 Dylan: Good night.

52:13 Wes: Good night.