I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Today I’m sharing ideas from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s first book, Either/Or, published in two parts in 1843. I haven’t read the books myself but am rather reporting the ideas from reviewing various online sources that discuss them, including The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Kierkegaard and Wikipedia’s entry on Either/Or.
Kierkegaard is sometimes called the father of existentialism despite the fact that he was a religious writer and theologian and more typical existentialists like Sartre and Camus were atheist. He was considered to be anti-Hegelian (which would put him opposed to my own philosophical blend) but his central ideas could be considered “creative developments of Hegel’s ideas,” and where he was seen to be critiquing Hegelianism that was actually directed at certain strands of Danish Hegelian thought. Kierkegaard influenced later thinkers in the phenomenological and existential traditions including Heidegger, Sartre, and Lévinas.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls Kierkegaard “a beguiling but frustrating thinker, full of provocations and insights but also difficult to nail down.”
I’m not going to try to fully nail down what he says in Either/Or or how it fits in to his broader philosophical thought but merely present the contrast it shares between the aesthetic life and the ethical life, as important grounding for deciding how to live.
In Either/Or, Kierkegaard presents the aesthetic and ethical life as two contrasting modes of existence that shape how a person finds meaning and navigates choice.
The aesthetic life, represented by the pseudonymous author “A,” is devoted to pleasure, novelty, and the pursuit of experience. The aesthete seeks to avoid boredom—the “root of all evil”—by curating life as a series of stimulating moments, whether through art, romance, or intellectual play. But because this mode depends on external stimulation and constant renewal, it ultimately leads to despair: the aesthete becomes fragmented, unable to commit to any enduring purpose. Kierkegaard’s portrayal is both seductive and tragic, showing how aesthetic living prizes possibility over actuality, preferring dreams and moods to moral responsibility.
By contrast, the ethical life, embodied by the second author “Judge Wilhelm,” is founded on commitment, duty, and self-choice in the deepest sense. The ethical individual accepts the limitations and responsibilities that come with making binding decisions—such as marriage, vocation, or moral integrity—and in doing so achieves continuity and inward freedom. Where the aesthete flees from choice, the ethical person embraces it as the means of becoming a self. For Kierkegaard, this transition from aesthetic to ethical existence marks a profound spiritual maturation: it is not the end of pleasure or individuality, but their transformation through the seriousness of choice. The book ultimately invites readers to reflect on their own “either/or”—to recognize that not choosing is itself a choice, and that a meaningful life requires the courage to commit.
In Kierkegaard’s description of the aesthetic life I see a foretelling of what modern South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han called the achievement society, described in his book The Burnout Society. Both Han’s achievement society and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life describe a culture fixated on novelty, what’s interesting, and how you can get the next dose of stimulation from life rather than pursuing moral depth or enduring commitment.
In Han’s view, we’ve moved from a disciplinary society, where institutions say what you must do, to a society of self-exploitation, where you drive yourself to greater and greater productive achievements and self-expression. The aesthetic individual, like Han’s “entrepreneur of the self,” is always reinventing, curating, and performing, chasing experiences and achievements that provide temporary meaning but lack grounding in ethical responsibility or relational stability.
For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic life fragments the self into moments. It resists continuity from one moment to the next because commitment feels like constraint. Han’s society of positivity operates the same way. By eliminating external limits, it dissolves the inner structure that makes an ethical life possibility. Without the friction of duty or the endurance of choice, life becomes an infinite scroll of possibilities.
Both philosophers warn that the pursuit of perpetual freedom can end in exhaustion or despair.
In my book manuscript Reckless Romance, I share the story of Rob Gordon from the 2000 movie High Fidelity. Rob curates his life around experience, taste, and emotional stimulation. He jumps from relationship to relationship, always finding something ultimately dissatisfying with each woman he dates. After his most recent breakup, in which, Laura, his live-in girlfriend of two years abruptly leaves him, he analyzes and ranks past breakups, mainly for his own narrative interest, not to grow or change. His behavior expresses the essence of the aesthetic life. He searches for identity through sensation and narration rather than through ethical choice or transformation.
Rob choses moods, but not himself or any level of commitment that would take him into the ethical life. He is perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually on a romantic hedonic treadmill, always pursuing novelty and thrill rather than the weight of commitment.
The ethical life would require Rob to take responsibility for the success of his relationships. He would need to see his partners not just as mirrors for his own self-image but as subjects in their own right. At the end of the film, Rob begins to realize this, and he and Laura decide to try again.
Kierkegaard also wrote of the religious life as a third and possibly higher stage after the aesthetic and ethical, in his later writings Fear and Trembling (1843) and Stages on Life’s Way (1845). It is not necessarily the case that these three spheres represent an evolution towards higher functioning, running from aesthetic to ethical to religious:
Kierkegaard often reads as if the existence-spheres operate in a hierarchy, with the aesthetic as “lowest” and Religiousness B as “highest”. However, this is arguably too simple: even if Kierkegaard does see the movement from the aesthetic and the ethical to the religious as progress, it would be a mistake to think of this in a purely linear way. There are ways in which an ethical character such as Judge William may be inferior to an aesthete such as “A”, and insights to be found in the aesthetes that are not repudiated or surpassed by what might be described as a “higher” pseudonym.
Nevertheless, I can imagine that such a simplification could be a helpful way of thinking about modes of life:
- In the aesthetic, you seek to curate your own personal brand as well as your aesthetic experience of life through social media, consumerism, and a constant search for what’s interesting and novel
- In the ethical, you ground yourself via commitments and morality, doing what you “should” do, almost a return to Han’s obedience society
- In the religious (and not necessarily the religious as Christianity), you move to a life of spirituality, hope, and love. Kierkegaard expresses the importance of faith in this stage. I don’t know where that fits into my own emerging philosophical framework, but maybe in another Tuesday Book Club, or maybe in Thursday Thinkers this week I’ll dig into that.
To me this sounds almost like a Hegelian dialectic — you start with the aesthetic as your thesis, then you contrast it via the ethical as the antithesis, and finally in the religious life you find its synthesis (or more accurately, Aufhebung — sublation).