Renxiang Liu's Reviews > Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

This is a fantastic demonstration of Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic and the ethic stages. Each has a corresponding avatar, both of which are interesting in unique ways.

The aesthetic man exhibits an obsession with immediacy. Worldly concerns are suspended in order to enable a pure experience of enjoyment. The seducer, i.e. the "author" of the Diary, is keen on the experience of love, which, unstable as it were, can only be found in the process of seduction. When the seduction reaches its goal, however, love is disenchanted, so that the only thing the seducer can do is to withdraw from it. This reminds me of the psychoanalytic model of desire, for which the object is impossible while the pleasure lies in the delusory pursuit.

For Kierkegaard, however, this is not the end of the story. For the aesthetic man only instantiates one mode of temporality, of "having time". This is what the ethic man calls "romantic love": that which concentrates itself so much within a particular moment that it cannot extend itself over time. The eternity it claims to seek to supposed to be found in nature, which makes that "eternity" essentially temporal. Hence though the aesthetic man promises eternity in love, that eternity is but an intention of extension; and because he is actually unable to extend his identity in time - his attention to immediacy makes him change all the time - the promise of eternity can never be fulfilled.

The ethic man, on the other hand, is by no means one of the kind that the aesthetic man despises, namely the people of mediocre morality. He attends to the eternal as well, yet neither in calculation like the mediocre man, nor in whimsical promises like the aesthetic man. He has the patience of realizing eternity in time. In other words, he does not dismiss temporal, successive devotion to love because of the superficial gap between the temporal and the eternal, for he understands that eternity is another kind of temporality, and, for that matter, can be present everywhere in temporal efforts.

As love is always in becoming, it is not a refutation of it if it fails to be represented atemporally. More important than a seemingly eternal expression is the inner enjoyment - and at the end of the day it is only this that is able to endure time. The aesthetic man always fails in his delusory pursuit of eternal love, because the "object", the ideal of love, is itself already dead for him. In trying in vain to "return" to some ideal love, the agent forgets that the ideal can also change, and is changing all the time. The solution is thus the ability to wait, to make room for the inherent creativity of time.

The continuity of life history, therefore, can only be realized by means of constant renewal: the renewed is the past in a sense, and is the future in another.

Corresponding to the ethic man's new notion of temporality is a new attitude towards duty. Unlike the aesthetic man, who dodges duty lest it threatens his freedom, the ethic man finds freedom in duty. For the latter, duty is a self-imposed intention to extend one's moral identity in time, a resolution. This is the genuine sense of the "shall" - an imperative not from the outside, but from within. By contrast, it is revealed that the aesthetic man, in his avoidance of duty, bears a deep inconfidence in his love, so that he does not dare to let his love confront anything that seems hostile, and in this inconfidence he is bound to lose it.

The "stages" of life are initially intended to denote successive periods or states that lead into the next. However, in this book we can also interpret them as dramatic stages, each with its own character, its own mode of experience, and its own temporality.