Aesthetic Life in Kierkegaard's Either/Or: Desire and Fulfillment
This paper examines Kierkegaard's aesthetic life view as presented in Either/Or, analyzing its norms, limitations, and relationship to the ethical and religious life views. Drawing on Aristotle's concept of "right desire," the paper traces how the pseudonymous author A constructs an aesthetics of pleasure centered on moderation and imagination, using the figure of Don Giovanni as a cautionary example of aesthetic excess. The paper argues that the aesthetic life, taken alone, is insufficient to fulfill human existential meaning — it requires the boundaries of ethics and, ultimately, the transcendent object of religious love to provide genuine happiness. Kierkegaard's implicit turn toward the religious life view is identified as the necessary resolution to the either/or dilemma.
- Introduction: Right Desire and the Aesthetic Framework: Aristotle, Plato, and Kierkegaard's framing of desire
- The Norms and Limitations of the Aesthetic Life: Don Giovanni illustrates aesthetic excess and failure
- The Alternative: Ethics, Religion, and the Art of Forgetting: Pain, forgetting, love, and the religious answer
- Finding the 'Right Desire': Prayer, religion, and transcendent aesthetic fulfillment
- Conclusion: Infinite desire requires an infinite object for fulfillment
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper sustains a single, clearly stated thesis throughout — that the aesthetic life cannot fulfill itself without ethical and religious support — and returns to it consistently in each section.
- It uses Don Giovanni as a concrete, recurring literary example to ground abstract philosophical claims about desire, moderation, and self-destruction, making the argument accessible and vivid.
- The integration of multiple thinkers — Aristotle, Plato, Kierkegaard, Dante, and Schiller — demonstrates broad philosophical awareness without losing focus on the central text.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs close reading of primary source quotations to build its argument incrementally. Rather than simply summarizing Kierkegaard's positions, it unpacks specific passages — on forgetting, love, prayer, and desire — and interprets them within a coherent philosophical framework. This technique of embedding direct citations and then immediately analyzing their implications is a strong model for philosophical essay writing at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a theoretical frame drawn from Aristotle and Plato before introducing Kierkegaard's Either/Or. The second section analyzes the aesthetic life's norms and uses Don Giovanni to show their limits. The third section introduces the alternative — the religious dimension — through discussions of suffering, forgetting, and love. The fourth section brings all threads together around the concept of "right desire" and the institutional religious life. The conclusion restates the thesis concisely, tying finite and infinite desire to their appropriate objects.
Introduction: Right Desire and the Aesthetic Framework
The crux of the aesthetic life — as well as the ethical life — depends upon the definition of norms and, as Aristotle implied, the cultivation of "right desire." This sense of "right desire" underlies the norm — whether constitutive, prescriptive, imperative, or otherwise — and establishes a kind of philosophical goal toward which mankind may strive. By sifting through one's numerous and sometimes contradictory desires for the "right desire," one is compelled to rely upon intellect and reason to discern an object or end — the philosophical goal that, like the light from on high in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, compels the philosopher to climb upward. In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, this light is examined from a number of perspectives, each making an assertion concerning "right desire," yet each offering differing opinions on what exactly that desire should be — whether aesthetic (as the pseudonymous A argues) or ethical (as the pseudonymous Judge argues), imaginary or practical. Within this framework, Kierkegaard explores life through lived experience and the meaning of life through the use of reason.
This paper explains the meaning and aim of life from within Kierkegaard's aesthetic life view and shows what it is to live the good or happy life according to its prescribed norms. It also examines whether, on its own terms, such a life view has the resources to realize its existential meaning and aim. The central claim is that it does not — that the aesthetic life relies upon the ethical life view to maintain any kind of equilibrium, to keep oneself from becoming like Mozart's Don Giovanni. In other words, the aesthetic view needs "right desire" — as Aristotle stated — but cannot fulfill it on its own, unless that desire comes from God Himself, as Kierkegaard implies, hinting at man's ultimate religious nature and purpose.
The Norms and Limitations of the Aesthetic Life
The first part of Either/Or deals with the aesthetic life view, and its authors — A and Johannes Climacus — speak on various subjects, including music, women, drama, and seduction. The appeal of music, according to A, is that it speaks directly and vividly to the imagination. The language A uses throughout is sweeping and excessive — romantic in a sense — the type of language one would expect from an aesthete. His discourse is pleasurable and yet measured; never surfeiting. This is an important point when discussing the aesthetic life: like the Epicurean, the aesthete does not strive for over-indulgence but for measure, lest he end up eternally damned like the unfortunate Don Giovanni.
Kierkegaard employs Don Giovanni as an example in his discourse on the aesthetic life because the figure emphasizes a two-fold principle. First, Don Giovanni owes his success with women to the fact that he understands the power of seduction — the aesthetic life view in action. His very name is enough to stir and rouse the passions: "Here one sees what I mean when I say that Don Giovanni resonates in Elvira, that it is something more than a phrase" (p. 122); or that "he resonates in Leporello" (p. 131); or that "there appeared a figure she cannot renounce, and that is Don Giovanni" (p. 191). Don Giovanni is the ultimate seducer — and he seduces even himself. Second, Don Giovanni, through lack of restraint and aesthetic measure, falls from the role of the comedian and reduces himself to the role of the villain: he seduces himself away from the aesthetic joy and pleasure of women by inordinately pursuing every woman and giving free rein to his lusts rather than controlling them through reason. The aesthete must operate according to reason — for it is reason that gives us our sense of "right desire." Don Giovanni loses his sense of "right desire" and is ultimately punished for it by God.
This allusion to God compels us to consider that which ultimately leaves the aesthete unfulfilled and unhappy: he cannot possess complete and utter fulfillment on this earth — which is precisely what Don Giovanni illustrates, as he strives ever more to fill a void that his unethical behavior only makes larger. Here we must address the nature of the prescriptive norm that the aesthetic life view promotes: if the "right desire" to which aesthetics applies is based on self-happiness, one may use Don Giovanni as an example to illustrate exactly how such happiness is — or is not — attained.
Were Don Giovanni to exercise some modicum of moderation, his story might very well have ended happily: perhaps he could have returned to Elvira, freed his lackey, and begun a respectable life without losing any of the charm or aesthetic appreciation he possessed. However, because he chose instead to glut himself on lust and abandon any notion of well-being, he destroys all hope of happiness for himself. Thus, Kierkegaard states of the pleasures of life, "They are to be enjoyed in moderation" (p. 25).
We also see that the meaning of life for the aesthete is to enjoy life — and that to enjoy life, one must abide by the rules which life establishes. Whence come these rules? That is another matter, and the second half of Either/Or deals with life's ethics. But this section on ethics hardly answers the question of whether the good life is fully attainable in this life. Ethics provides the parameters within which the aesthete may find enjoyment, lest his enjoyment deviate into the realm of self-destruction, as seen in the case of Don Giovanni. Even so, one may argue that the fence ethics provides around one's life — in order to allow one to better harvest happiness — fails to guarantee that one's harvest shall in fact bear fruit.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the aesthetic — and ethical — life depends upon maintaining the "right desire." As desire is synonymous with its object, the object must be of sufficient worth to provide that which it promises: fulfillment of desire. Because there is a difference between earthly or finite desire and spiritual or infinite desire, one must acknowledge that infinite desire requires an infinite object — Heaven — or else, as Mozart's Don Giovanni shows, one will find oneself somewhere one does not wish to be. Thus, Kierkegaard's aesthete is limited in his desire for happiness unless he takes into account the infinite.
Reference List
Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Either/Or. Princeton University Press.
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