Summary: Either/Or (page 6)

To illustrate this, Kierkegaard proposes a thought experiment: give them what they love—wealth, honours, women—and they appear happy. But take these goods away, and they become unhappy. Yet they have not been deprived of anything essential to the self, only of something inessential, something accidental—one remains the same person whether one has little or much money. Consequently, if they despair, it must come from an earlier despair. ¹

A watertight syllogism that leads him to conclude:

It therefore seems that every aesthetic view of life is despair, and that every individual who lives aesthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not […] Consequently, it would seem entirely natural to make the movement by which the ethical asserts itself.

Moreover, how can one be happy when one has no will—which belongs only to the ethical stage? Melancholy is a sin […] it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely—and it is therefore the mother of all sins.

Finally, he adds two further arguments: Every view of life whose condition lies outside itself is despair, and it is always despair to have one's life in what can pass away.

We thus reach the final form—and the truth—of the aesthetic life: melancholy. Here, the nihilism underlying this conception of existence unfolds in its full extent. It is the figure of the disenchanted dandy.

For in this last form, the aesthete continues to live in enjoyment, but looks upon it with contempt: You are quite done with everything finite. And yet you cannot abandon it. Compared with those who chase satisfaction, you are satisfied—but what you have become satisfied with is absolute dissatisfaction.

Strictly speaking, Kierkegaard does not use the term 'nihilism': even if it appears in Hegel's writings, it would only be popularised from 1862 onwards, with the publication of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. He speaks rather of 'scepticism': Your speeches always end in very pure scepticism.

This disenchanted character—representative of the ultimate stage of the aesthetic—reveals itself through several signs:

• a refusal to work: You are an enemy of activity […] You are idle […] You put your hands in your pockets and watch life. Or else a fragmented kind of work, lasting only six months before being abandoned.

• one lives in the moment, since no project can unfold within the horizon of such scepticism.

• a universal rejection of pleasures: if one offered such a man a million, or the love of the most beautiful young woman, the answer would be: Yes, perhaps one might sacrifice a day to it.

• pride: You are proud.

• malice: You are treacherous with people—which, however, one cannot reproach you for from an ethical point of view, for you stand outside ethical determinations.

Above all, there is a kind of falseness, for the aesthete does not frankly admit to others that he is unhappy. On the contrary, he is someone who parties, laughs out loud, keeps up appearances: You take pleasure in deceiving people with your laughter—which ends up resembling, in the end, more of a snigger.

But he himself is aware of his condition: You see […] that life is despair—hide it from others; you cannot hide it from yourself.

How can one escape this state? How can one leave the aesthetic conception of life for the ethical conception, and thus attain happiness?

Kierkegaard sets out the stages of this profound existential transformation—something like a second birth: It is not another being you must give birth to, but yourself.

First of all, one must come out of falseness: become conscious of oneself and of one's unhappiness, in truth. One must take the full measure of one's melancholy and assume it as such. Some never accomplish this essential task, and spend their whole lives in lying and denial: It is a grave and important moment when one […] becomes conscious of oneself as the one one is. And yet one may well not do it. That is an "either—or".

How is one to do it?

In fact, to become conscious of oneself—to become conscious of one's unhappiness and assume it—is to despair. The gateway to happiness is therefore, paradoxically, despair:

There is no other way out for you than the one I have indicated: despair! Choose despair: for despair itself is a choice. One may doubt without choosing to doubt, but one cannot despair without choosing it. And in despairing, one chooses again—and what does one choose? One chooses oneself, not in one's immediacy, not as some arbitrary individual, but one chooses oneself in one's eternal validity.

Despair is a return to oneself in one's first truth—an acceptance of oneself through full recognition of one's melancholy condition. We know that Kierkegaard devoted an entire work to this notion, The Sickness unto Death, a few years after the publication of Either/Or.

Here the treatment is briefer, but Kierkegaard already grants full philosophical dignity to this category, which had been little explored by earlier thinkers—even though Hegel had already devoted an entire chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit to 'unhappy consciousness'.

The first thing to do is to distinguish this notion from a neighbouring one: doubt. Doubt is a central category of modern philosophy, ever since Descartes made it a precondition for any sound reflection: Modern philosophy has said more than was necessary when it claimed that doubt is the basis of all speculation.

What, then, is the difference between these two concepts?

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