The “Or” section of Kierkegaard’s commentary on the values of aesthetics versus ethics is written by the fictional B, a married judge counseling his friend A on the errors of his licentious ways. B begins, “Just consider, your life is passing; for you, too, the time will eventually come even to you when your life is at an end, when you are no longer shown any further possibilities in life, when recollection alone is left, recollection, but not in the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth, but the earnest and faithful recollection of conscience.” B is trying to convince his friend that a faithful marriage is, in fact, aesthetically valid. He continues, “Romantic love manifests itself as immediate by exclusively resting in natural necessity…. Although this love is based essentially on the sensuous, it nevertheless is noble by virtue of the consciousness of the eternal that it assimilates, for it is this that distinguishes all love [Kjaerlighed] from lust [Vellyst]: that it bears a stamp of eternity. The lovers are deeply convinced that in itself their relationship is a complete whole that will never be changed.” But to B marriage brings about a kind of love even more profound than this type of love as well. “The defect in earthly love [Kjaerlighed] is the same as its merit—that it is preference [Forkjaerlighed]. Spiritual love has no preference and moves in the opposite direction, continually sheds all relativities. Earthly love, when it is true, goes the opposite way and at its highest is love only for a single human being in the whole world. This is the truth of loving only one and only once…. Thus marriage is sensuous but also spiritual, free and also necessary, absolute in itself and also within itself points beyond itself…. What I want to stress, however, is the beauty in the marriages that have as little “why” as possible. The less “why,” the more love…. A person who marries for this and that etc. is taking a step that is just as unesthetic as it is irreligious. The goodness of his objective is of no use, for the mistake is precisely that he has an objective.”
B then compares the love within a faithful marriage to that of first love. “Thus it is not true that marriage is an exceedingly respectable but tiresomely moral role and that erotic love [Elskov] is poetry; no, marriage is really the poetic. And if the world has often witnessed with pain that a first love cannot be sustained, I shall grieve along with the world but shall also bring to mind that the defect was not so much in what happened later as in its not beginning rightly. What the first love lacks, then, is the second esthetic ideal, the historical. It does not have the law of motion in itself.” B then recites a litany of his ideals for marriage. “Honesty, frankness, openness, understanding—this is the life principle in marriage. Without this understanding, marriage is unbeautiful and actually immoral, for then the sensuous and the spiritual, which love unites, are separated. Only when the being with whom I live in the most tender union in earthly life is just as close to me in the spiritual sense, only then is my marriage moral and therefore also esthetically beautiful…. It takes courage to appear as one really is.”
B continues by relating his conception of the true nature of the aesthetic. “Most people seek esthetic satisfaction, which the soul needs, in reading, in viewing works of art, etc.; whereas there are relatively few who themselves see the esthetic as it is in existence, who themselves see existence in an esthetic light and do not enjoy only the poetic reproduction…. An esthetic representation always requires a concentration in the moment [Moment], and the richer this concentration is, the greater the esthetic effect…. Either this is a predestined moment, as it were, that sends a shudder through the consciousness by awakening the idea of the divineness of existence, or the moment presupposes a history…. How, then, can the esthetic, which is incommensurable even for portrayal in poetry be represented? Answer: by being lived…. He who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound—he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in esthetics…. We are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.”
B’s second essay, in the form of a long letter to A, is on “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.” He begins, “Wherever in the stricter sense there is a question of an Either/Or, one can always be sure that the ethical has something to do with it. The only absolute Either/Or is the choice between good and evil, but this is also absolutely ethical…. The person who wants to decide his life task ethically does not ordinarily have such a wide range; the act of choosing, however, is much more meaningful to him…. The is an Either/Or that makes a human being greater than the angels…. What takes precedence in my Either/Or is, then, the ethical. Therefore, the point is still not that of choosing something; the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing…. The esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.”
B now and then specifically addresses A and tries to rebut his particular aesthetic stance of resigned despair to exterior worldly life. “It is manifest that every esthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives esthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not. But when one knows this, and you certainly know it, then a higher form of existence is an imperative requirement…. It is not despair involving something actual but despair in thought. Your thought has rushed ahead; you have seen through the vanity of everything, but you have not gone further. Occasionally you dive into it, and when for a single moment you abandon yourself to enjoyment, you are also aware that it is vanity. Thus you are continually beyond yourself—that is, in despair. Therefore, your life lies between two enormous contradictions: at times you have colossal energy, at times an equally great indolence.” B continues lecturing A on his particular aesthetic personality, which finds contentment in despair. “As far as enjoyment goes, you have an absolutely aristocratic pride. This is entirely appropriate, for, after all, you are finished with the finite altogether. And yet you cannot give it up. Compared with those who are chasing after satisfaction, you are satisfied, but that in which you find your satisfaction is absolute dissatisfaction…. In a certain sense you are right, for nothing that is finite, not even the whole world, can satisfy the soul of a person who feels the need for the eternal.”
B goes on by describing ethics as intwined with the universal. “The person who views life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses the universal in his life. He makes himself the universal human being, not by taking off [affore] his concretion, for then he becomes a complete non-entity, but by putting it on [ifore] and interpenetrating it with the universal. The universal human being is not a phantom, but every human being is the universal human being…. The person who lives esthetically is an accidental human being; he believes he is the perfect human being by being the one and only human being. The person who lives ethically works toward becoming the universal human being.” The ethical also has a unique way of viewing the nature of the Self. “The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself…. That is why the ethical life has this duplexity, in which the individual has himself outside himself within himself…. If he does not hold firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.”
B concludes by again confronting the rare aesthetic life-view held by A, directly. He explains to A what happens to the person who cannot accept the universal, but must stand apart, as the exception. “If it so happens that the universal he is unable to actualize is the very thing he desired, then in one sense he will, if he is high-minded, rejoice in this circumstance…. He will then be convinced that there is something of the universal that he cannot actualize. But he is not finished with this conviction, for it will generate a profound sorrow in his soul…. He himself will grieve, not cravenly and dejectedly, but deeply and openly, for he will say: Nevertheless, I do love the universal. If it is the happy fate of others to testify to the universally human by actualizing it, well, then I testify to it by my grief…. I have placed myself outside the universal; I have deprived myself of all the guidance, the security, and the reassurance that the universal gives; I stand alone, without fellow-feeling, for I am an exception. But he will not become craven and disconsolate; he will confidently go his solitary way; indeed, he has demonstrated the correctness of what he did—he has his pain.”
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