Summary: Either/Or (page 5)

Yes, History can be analysed from a dialectical point of view, as a necessary process driven by synthesis. But this explanatory principle holds only a posteriori, once events have occurred; it holds only when we look back at the past to explain it:
The philosopher mediates the past and is in the past; philosophy rushes into the past […] Like the philosophers, you believe life comes to a stop. For the philosopher, world history is finished—and he mediates. ¹

And it is true that Hegel lays himself open to this objection, with his famous metaphor of the owl of Minerva. In a passage from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, he compares philosophy to an owl that takes flight only at dusk—in other words, the philosopher can analyse events only after they have occurred; and, more broadly, world history can be understood only a posteriori, only when we reflect on the past. It is then that the dialectical process appears at work, and History seems subject to determinism.

By contrast, when we look towards the future—a wholly different level of explanation, a wholly different point of view—freedom reasserts itself; free choice, the Kierkegaardian absolute choice, finds its legitimacy. At every moment we are confronted with the need to act in one way rather than another; we must constantly forgo possibilities: It is true that there is a future; it is true that there is an "either—or".

Moreover, we must distinguish between inner acts—reflections, choices, decisions—and outer acts, which produce the historical events we know. Only the latter can be analysed by the philosopher and regarded as subject to determinism and to Hegelian dialectic. Free inner acts elude the philosopher: In that world there reigns an absolute "either—or", but philosophy has nothing to do with that world. It is here, in the world of subjective inwardness, that we find freedom and absolute choice without mediation: This treasure is buried in your own heart: there there is an "either—or" that makes a being greater than the angels.

Kierkegaard has managed to carve out, against Hegel, a space in which his theory finds legitimacy. He mounts an effective challenge to the totalising ambitions of the Hegelian system. Yes, something escapes dialectic, escapes the System: precisely the 'either/or'—that is, choice—and beyond that, human freedom, and therefore ethics, since we have known since Kant that the one is the condition of the other:

Through my "either—or", ethics appears.

Now if, in Hegel's own words, the True is the Whole, then it is enough for something to escape the system to reveal its emptiness. An incomplete and unfinished System is a contradiction in terms—and yet that is precisely what Kierkegaard shows, which is why he strikes a decisive blow against Hegelian philosophy here.

Kierkegaard now feels the need to spell out more precisely the different terms of his theory, and to describe more fully what an aesthetic life and an ethical life might be. To do so, he plays them off against one another so that their contrast becomes clearer—their differences will shed light on their nature.

This opposition will occupy him until the end of the book.

First, he sums up their essential difference in a rather mysterious formula:
The aesthetic in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.

Without yet clarifying the meaning of this formula any further—we will return to it—he presents the characteristic traits of the aesthetic life in a richly satisfying piece of psychological analysis.
The aesthete is witty, ironic, observant, dialectical, full of "experience" in pleasures […] sentimental and, depending on circumstances, heartless. He lives only in the moment, and that is why [his] life dissolves.

His maxim might be one must enjoy life or one must live to satisfy desire.

Kierkegaard then presents, one after another, several forms of the aesthetic conception of life, founded respectively on health, beauty, and wealth. A single common point unites them: the condition of happiness is not posited by the will of the individual himself.

He turns to a historical example: Nero, the tyrant who devotes his life to unrestrained pleasure. It is said that he took aesthetic delight when a fire ravaged Rome for six days, and recited poems. In a sense, it was a magnificent spectacle, endorsable from an aesthetic standpoint; but from an ethical standpoint it can only provoke consternation, since it caused thousands of deaths.

One might object that this is a caricature, not representative of the kind of aesthetic existence that anyone might live. But Judge Wilhelm maintains that it is its fully developed logical expression: It can be useful to understand where this conception of life leads—precisely when everything conspires to favour it.

The aesthete to whom he addresses his sermon would in fact agree, if we are to believe him: You once said, with your usual audacity, that one could not blame Nero for burning Rome in order to get an idea of the burning of Troy; but one might ask whether he was truly artist enough to know how to enjoy that spectacle.

Despite all the pleasures he procures for himself through his power and money, Nero is unhappy. And so the examination of his figure yields a precious result: The nature of Nero is called: melancholy.

We can generalise this to all those who have chosen, to a lesser degree, the aesthetic conception of life: they are struck by 'melancholy'—an old, poetic form of what we would now call 'depression'.

Why are aesthetes in despair?

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading