Abstract: Kierkegaard is well known for expounding a trilogy of different ways of life (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious lives), yet there are various subgroups within these categories that it is important to distinguish. Of the different ways of life, the aesthetic is the broadest in scope, incorporating an abundant range of variations. It is defined most simply as the life lived for enjoyment. Yet there are different objects and methods of enjoyment, and within the aesthetic way of life there are numerous subspecies that are differentiated accordingly. In the second volume of Either/Or, the representative of the ethical life, Judge William, gives a typology of seven different versions of the aesthetic life differentiated according to the object of one's enjoyment: (1) beauty or health, (2) money, honors, or status, (3) talent, (4) the immediate fulfillment of desire, (5) reflective enjoyment, (6) cynical renunciation, and (7) poetic expression of the "nothingness" and despair of life. In the first volume of Either/Or we get a close look at two main versions of the aesthetic life. The pseudonymous representative of this life, known simply as A, proposes more than one typology for differentiating a type of life according to its primary object and method of enjoyment.1 Perhaps most helpfully, though, he suggests a fundamental distinction between those who seek enjoyment "immediately," in actual experience, and those who seek enjoyment "reflectively," in reflection on these experiences.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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