Either/or part 1
Soren Kirkegaard
Either/Or Part 1
Brief synopsis
Aesthetic vs. Ethical
Kierkegaard presents Either/Or as a collection of papers by two fictional characters:
A (the Aesthete): lives for pleasure, beauty, and personal experience.
Judge Wilhelm (the Ethicist): argues for a life of moral responsibility and personal commitment.
The Aesthetic Life (Either)
The aesthetic life is about avoiding boredom, seeking pleasure, and staying emotionally detached. Aesthetes often enjoy art, music, cleverness, and seduction. They fear commitment and try to avoid suffering by never taking life too seriously.
But here’s the catch: the aesthetic life eventually leads to despair. Why? Because constantly chasing pleasure and avoiding deeper meaning leaves one feeling empty and disconnected. Life becomes a series of distractions, not a coherent story. Some may argue that life can be told in terms of disconnected plots, (which can be argued as being entertaining), but just like any movie that doesn’t have any coherence, the life of the Aesthetes will eventually unfold to one of chaos and incoherence.
The Ethical Life (Or)
The ethical life is about embracing responsibility, choosing purpose, and building character. Judge Wilhelm urges A to grow up—stop floating through life and make real choices that reflect your values. The ethical person sees life as something to be shaped, not avoided.
Living ethically means confronting your limitations, accepting suffering as part of meaning, and striving for authenticity. Unlike the aesthetic person, the ethical person takes full ownership of their existence. But with all things, it is important to question what the difference is between real choices and non-real choices. To offer some context, the material choices we make everyday can be seen as real choices but to a certain extent, it can also be said that it is an extension of our instincts. The importance of real choices is not the choices themselves but the latter part, the “reflections of the values.” People will make the same choices as others but for different reasons. We then ask ourselves whether the means to the end is resolute or if the ends justifies the means. If two people come to the same conclusion using different reasoning, which one is right?
Can the Aesthetic and the ethical come to the same conclusion?
Make a choice
At the heart of Either/Or is Kierkegaard’s big idea: you must choose how to live. There’s no neutral ground. Even not choosing is itself a choice (usually aesthetic).
This emphasis on personal responsibility and inner transformation sets Kierkegaard apart from other philosophers of his time. He doesn’t want you to just analyze life—he wants you to live it. Deeply. Consciously. Honestly.
“Hope is not a good strategy.” Sound familiar? Hope is not to be seen nor “used” as a way to something. It is a state of being; an underlying foundation from which action will be guided upon. But why hope? Because hope is one thing that stops people from taking action. They take a good thing like hope and turn it into some excuse not to act.
Despair
Kierkegaard thinks despair isn’t just a bad feeling—it’s actually a signal. When the aesthetic life fails (and it always will), despair wakes you up. It forces you to confront the truth: your life lacks a deeper grounding.
But that moment of despair can also become the first step toward a more authentic life. That’s where the shift to the ethical stage begins. But like any thinker, when a claim is made, questions should be asked; Should despair then be chased?
Instead of that, ask “Is a bad thing in it of itself a bad thing or does the person executing the action make it bad?” (For those of you who are thinking that the argument of good and bad is not a worthwhile endeavor, you are one step closer to logical positivism, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but outside of the scope of this conversation.)
Let’s take the avenue that a bad thing is not bad because of someone, but because it is “chemically” (the makeup) bad. Do we then need to experience it to know its bad? Surely not! Though we know that despair has great potential to lead to an “ethical” life, one does not need to experience it. (I will say that despair is a human state and one that does not need to be frowned upon.) I will strike it further and state that despair gives wisdom to the ones who are aware.
(Any amount of notice to emotional states requires a certain level of awareness. The argument that humans can feel nothing at any moment in time, I believe, is misguided. The inability to feel is just a stifle of emotional dexterity and not the absence of emotion. To put it in Kantian terms, emotion exists outside of our perception; it exists in it of itself.)
Faith plays even a deeper role
Though Either/Or focuses on the aesthetic and ethical modes, Kierkegaard will later argue that both are incomplete without a third stage: the religious life, grounded in faith. (More to come on that later…)
The major theme you ought to get out of this short and simple synopsis is this: you must make a choice, to either live a life of pleasure without ever taking yourself seriously or to live a life that is disciplined and that’s only half the battle. Now you gotta choose if that’s going to be applied to all of your life, or just a part. Either/or.