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Epilogue: Kierkegaard on the Aesthetic Life EPILOGUE: KIERkeGAARD ON THE AESTHETIC LIFE 1. In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard developedo a view of the aesthetic life in his frst major work, Either/Or,1 and, a few years later, through a chap- ter on “The Banquet” (modeled upon Plato’s Symposium) in Stages on Life’s Way.2 The peculiarity of these works is that, though presupposing a philosophical substructure, they are literary in character: collections of aphorisms, a dialogue, essays, diaries, a sermon, letters. This is central to Kierkegaard’s intention to call attention to “existence,” that is, to the character of human subjectivity as individually instantiated rather than as objectively refected upon in terms of concepts.3 1Either/Or D. Swenson and L. Swenson trans., two volumes. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1944) (henceforth E/O). 2Stages on Life’s Way. W. Lowrie trans. (New York: Shocken Books, 1967) (henceforth SLW). There is a difference between aesthetic theory regarding the arts and the exposition of the life of the aesthete that I am providing here. For a sketch of the former, see George Pattiso, “Art in an age of refection,” Alasdair Hannay ed. Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76–100 (henceforth H and M). Peder Jothan helpfully distinguishes four aspects of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s work: as a stage of existence, as a view of art and beauty, as a literary style, and as a mode of reli- gious existence. Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood: The Art of Subjectivity. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 10ff (henceforth KAS). 3Concluding Unscientifc Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. W. Lowrie trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 292–5 (henceforth CUP). © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 247 R.E. Wood, Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7 248 EPILOGUE: KIERKEGAARD ON THE AESTHETIC LIFE The aesthetic stage or sphere is, following Hegelian terminology, the stage of “immediacy.” It has a variable range. It plays in tandem with “refection.” These terms refer initially to what is roughly equivalent to Hegel’s Nature and Spirit where Nature is everything from the animal level down, even in us, while Spirit is the distinctively human, modi- fed by and modifying “Nature” in us. Spirit is the sphere of refec- tion that allows for the deliberate transformation of “immediacy.” For Kierkegaard, the frst meaning of “immediacy” is what is given through our natural endowment: what we would today call our “genetic endow- ment,” our organism with its sensory presentations and appetites. But there is a second, a distinctively human mediated immediacy that is the sphere of the cultivated aesthete. Unlike the other works mentioned, Sickness Unto Death is focused upon the conceptual structure of “Spirit.” Again close to Hegel, human nature is a synthesis of mind and body, of the eternal and the tempo- ral, of the infnite and the fnite, and, following from all this, of freedom and necessity. But so conceived, the self is not the synthesis, but is the fact that the synthesis “relates itself to its own self.”4 It is individual self- presence in the midst of these humanly universal polarities that is crucial. Hegel provides the basis for these polarities and for the peculiar view of the self. For Hegel our mind is related to the eternal and infnite via the notion of Being with which the mind is identifed, while everything related to our body involves us in the temporally immediate and fnite. The notion of Being includes everything in its scope and everything about everything, but it includes all that emptily and thus in the form of the question about the Whole and our place in it. When confronted with any putative limit, we are always able to ask what might exist beyond it, et sic ad infnitum.5 That is because the notion of Being is all-encompassing— whatever we may come to think the All consists in. Even John Locke, sensate empiricist though he was, claimed that, if anything exists, eter- nity exists.6 The only problem is where it is located: in the ongo- ing processes of Nature as a whole or in another level beyond Nature. 4Sickness Unto Death. W. Lowrie trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 146 (henceforth SUD). 5HPM, §386, 23–41. 6Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P. Nidditch ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 622. He seems not to be aware how this blows a hole in his empiricism. EPILOGUE: KIERKEGAARD ON THE AESTHETIC LIFE 249 But such a claim involves a ground in the notion of the All given with the notion of Being which arises within the mind when it frst thinks. And for Hegel, it is the openness to the Whole that prises us loose from any fnitude, even our own, and hands us over to ourselves, privileged— or condemned—to form ourselves by choosing between the options available to us. The I stands over against everything, including its own determinations. We are determinate/indeterminate: determined by our genes, our upbringing, and our past choices, so that we have only a limited set of options for determination. But, as I, each of us is free to determine oneself within the necessary limits of one’s situation at any given time.7 This is the context Kierkegaard assumes, for he merely lists, without developing, the polarities: mind and body, the eternal and the tempo- ral, the infnite and the fnite, freedom and necessity. For him, the syn- thesis involved in each of these polarities is a relation; but freedom lies in the fact that the synthesis in us is “a relation that relates itself to its own self.” I would say that the self-turning relation again follows from the notion of Being which, along with the whole of what is, includes the whole of what we each individually are. Such a relation related to itself is the index of human freedom: detached, via the notion of Being, from all determinacy, we are each compelled to choose. The three levels of necessity in us—genetic, cultural, and personal-historical—establish a “mediated immediacy.” Everything turns upon the principle of choice we employ in taking up this immediacy. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, initial or mediated, is a constant in human experience; but we can relate to it from different perspectives. He considers it in terms of two other stages, the ethical and the religious. If the aesthetic is taken as the primary sphere of existence, its princi- ple, its “categorical imperative,” is “Enjoy yourself.” And that means, “Whatever makes you feel good, crude or refned, do it.” The principle 7Though Kierkegaard is clearly in many respects anti-Hegel, whom he views as “forget- ting, in world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be an existing individual, with passion and inwardness, (CUP, 109), he draws heavily upon Hegelian categories. See Stephen Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1995), 4–8. Exposition of the three levels can be found in any of the many overall presentations of Kierkegaard’s thought, but espe- cially helpful is Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) (henceforth KDI). 250 EPILOGUE: KIERKEGAARD ON THE AESTHETIC LIFE of the ethical sphere might be expressed in the imperative, “Do your duty” and the religious in the command, “Stand before God.”8 CUP, 256. Either/Or presents us with the fundamental choice between a life ruled by the aesthetic imperative and one ruled by the ethics of commitment— concretely, by Judge William’s commitment to his wife, his profession, and his community. The work concludes with the relaying of a sermon the judge had heard that moves us toward the larger context of the Whole to which we relate in the religious sphere.9 Here we fnd the conclusion to the self-relation in the oppositions listed above: “In relating itself to itself, it relates itself to that which founds it,” namely, God.10 The problem for Kierkegaard is that the only way to achieve this relation is to leap over the Paradox, the contradiction that is the God-Man, and thus to transcend reason. 11 2. All this heavy philosophical lifting is the sub-text behind its concrete exhibition in particular characters in Kierkegaard’s work. His basic tack is to embody philosophic principles in human characters, setting the direction for twentieth-century Existentialists like Sartre and Marcel who wrote novels and plays in tandem with their more abstract philosophical works. But Kierkegaard has a peculiar way of presenting his thought. He produced two lines of work: the better known are his so-called “pseu- donymous” works, some of which are collected by one pseudonym and written by others.12 But Kierkegaard simultaneously published in his own name works that are lesser known and that showed his own com- mitment to the religious.13 In the former, following the example of 8CUP, 256. 9E/O, II, 339–56. 10SUD, 126. 11John Caputo notes Hegel’s infuence on the whole project of the three stages: “Like Hegel, Kierkegaard thinks of a kind of education of the spirit by way of a gradual ascent to higher and richer forms of life as lower forms collapse from internal contradictions.” Kierkegaard, London: Granta Books, 2007), 30. 12The Point of View of My Work as an Author. W. Lowrie trans. New York: Harper and Row, 1962) (henceforth POV). 13For example, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, H. Hong and E. Hong ed. and trans.
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