Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 58)

by Patrick L. Gardiner

For it is now claimed that such self-awareness may be repressed or ignored, or that at any rate its true implications may be subtly evaded. Despair about his life and its foundation is, in fact, a necessity if the aesthetic individual is to recognize that a ‘higher’ form of existence is an absolute requirement; yet it is precisely this crucial step in the direction of the ethical that he is unwilling to take. He remains too deeply rooted in his own mode of life and thought to attempt to liberate himself and seeks instead, by a variety of stratagems, to keep the truth from impinging upon him. This sometimes happens through a person’s trying to overcome or obliterate his inner dissatisfaction by various kinds of activity: it may take a ‘demonic’ form, as in the Faustian case; but it can equally well find expression in the life of a ‘respectable’ man of affairs, going pertinaciously about his business. There is, however, a more insidious shape which it is apt to assume. For there exists what Kierkegaard once called a ‘dialectical interplay of knowledge and will’ which can make it hard to tell whether a person is consciously trying to distract himself from a predicament which he realizes (however obscurely) to be his or whether, on the other hand, he has so interpreted his condition as to make it appear to preclude the whole notion of fundamental choice and change. And the second of these possibilities may be actualized.