Footnotes to Kierkegaard's 3 life stages

Literary theory, being-towards-death, and why I am so bad at blogging

I have talked to a lot of you individually over the past months, in ways that have helped me tremendously, both personally and intellectually, but I have not made much public, open-source writing. For this I genuinely apologize.

Two days ago while in the shower, I had a moment of insight, synthesis of literary theory and Kierkegaard’s life stages, that I think, if I can explain right, might be useful to some.

I have previously talked about "not being able to stand another Christmas of playing pretend". Well, easier said than done. There is a world of difference between inclinations and commitment. It is very easy to reason and be honest - it is very difficult to speak and act. This is the basic "life is understood backwards but lived forwards", but this is also mere introduction. There is not much to be said about that.

In short summery, the three stages in KG is the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Here very specific things are meant by each term, which is not immediately recognizable at a glance by the modern reader, and it's worth reading Either/Or to get the nuance of each term. But to the uninitiated: aesthetic does not mean "loves beauty" as such, but is perhaps easier understood as some combination of "cynic, Materialist, nihilist" - the name is not to signify that they evaluate aesthetic as a more noble goal than Morality, but that they live in a purely aesthetic universe, operate purely by a flat world of surfaces, without meaning or value, that there is no depth or significance beyond the surface of things. Pure pragmatism. Brains in a jar, historical materialism, Gnosticism, all rejection of the body, Freudianism, all of these are aesthetic world views, because they exclude the moral, explain away Morality as a induced or produced effect of some other mechanistic cause: a hallucination caused by some input. A secondary effect of a more primary source.

An aesthetic worldview says "we call things moral which appease our appetite". The moral-ethical worldview says, Morality exists with or without us, and you can have a dull or refined palette for it, insofar as it relates to our appetites. The aesthete worries about how what he says 'makes him look', how he is perceived, the ethical worries about what he *is*. The aesthete lives in a world of pictures.

KG talks about the “teleological suspencion of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling. I think this idea, this form, can be scaled backwards to the previous Life Stages, which is both useful in understand the idea of the religious suspension of the ethical as the key to the transcendental, and other things, aspects of life that we all experience.

I think the literary terms of comedy and tragedy, function in a related way: comedy is the moral Suspension of the aesthethic, and tragedy the aesthetical suspension of the ethical.

Here I use the terms in the literary sense, where comedy means, “the story ends with a marriage”, and tragedy means “the story ends with a death”. I dont mean the "haha" comedy of the genre of the same name that is popular today, but "they lived happily ever after" comedy, as what the term means when analysing shakespeare. To complete the clarification and/or confusion: “Comedy”, as the word is used today - haha-comedy - falls almost entirely within the realm of literary tragedy.

A series of examples.

Diogenes has stood the test of time because he is, in this sense, a comedic hero. He sacrifices all aesthethic concerns of politeness and social acceptance, in favor of a moral end: a total commitment to philosophy. He lives like a bum, acts like a fool, because his commitment to “Truth”, suspends the aesthethic. The timeless apeal of his character is that of the literary comedic hero.

The Joker of contemporary fame, is paradoxically, a tragic hero, not a comedic one. This is the appeal of the character: the tension between his name and his inversed nature. When the joker says in the latest movie of the same name, “I thought my life was a tragedy, now I realise it is a comedy”, as a dramatic moment of reaching his breaking point and embrasing madness, the exact opposite is what happens in terms of literary stucture: when he embraces madness, embraces a criminal violent lifestyle of loneliness (“you wouldn’t get it”), this is structurally speaking the Tragic Turn in the story: The story ends with a funeral, not with a marriage. The appeal, such as it is, of this kind of thing, is this tension between opposites, between something that is said and how it means its exact opposite.

Modernity, as a philosophy or worldview, is an occult tragedy. Christianity is a divine comedy.

The phenomenon of writers writing a character that is intended to be a villain, but is then celebrated by the audience, like Rorshack of Watchmen fame, or Starship Troopers, or the one Not-Superman from that one TV show I will never watch, and people going “Noo you dont get it it’s supposed to be a mean spirited parody of the thing you like”:

Rorshack is written by the author as an aesthethic figure, but read by the audience as moral figure. The author operates aesthethically, writes aesthethically, and sees him only as a “picture”. The reader, you, if you are reading this, are someone who at least has dipped a toe into the moral life stage. You read the character morally, in a moral framework, and reads him as a “man”.

This is incidentally also why all popular writing sucks now, it's all entirely preoccupied with appearances, on images, on “what it looks like”. Bad writing, overwriting in particular, operates on the framework of “making sure the reader has the exact same image in his head as you”. Perfetly replicating a speficic “aesthethic”, form over function.

The chink in, for example, Mr BAP’s nudist armor, is that he is, despite appearances, not an aesthethe, but firmly with the Kierkegaardian ethical. Only with a small penchant for vanity - which is honestly typical of the KGian ethicist. To be anybody on the Internet, to be a public intellectual, a public persona, you must also always be a 'funny man', and all jokers are tragic heroes - execpt diogenes. Few has the commitment to the bit to be Diogenes.

Here it is important to say, we don't do away with aesthetics in the moral stage. But, "aesthetics is the highest morality" is a meaningless statement to the true aesthete, and can only be uttered by the ethical - for whatever reasons he might have to say it.

It can be very difficult to step from stage 1 to 2, into the moral universe. If for example you have been a fanatic about certain medical treatments in recent years, or certain lifestyle medical treatments, on behalf of your children, to be “on the right side of history” (an aesthethic state), stepping out of the aesthetic stage into the moral might mean having to face that you have harmed your child for your own aesthetic gratification - a crime so terrible blood cries out for blood. As others have observed about such things, there are a lot of people who will never be able to face that about themselves, and will sunk cost themselves into believing certain things for the rest of their lives, because the alternative is, existentially, psychologically, death.

The reason I say all of this is to explain what I experienced in the shower. I have lamented in many different contexts this experience, which I've described as "pretending to be middle class to make mother happy", "my family living in a deranged fantasy world", "re-enacting dead rituals for the entertainment of children that don't exist, because neither of me or my brother have children, and we are both in our 30s" and many such things. And the reason I can't do it any more is because it is suspending the ethical for someone else’s aesthethic enjoyment.

My problem is that when my family asks me to participate in these hollow, half remembered rituals, I am suspending my morality for their aesthetic pleasure, and that causes me great suffering - it makes me unhappy even if I am supposedly sacrifising myself for “the good of others”. This is because it is structurally tragic, and you can’t escape that by force of will alone: tragedy and comedy are discovered, not created. If sacrifising youself doesnt make you smile, you are moving down the ladder, not up the ladder.

You could perhaps scale this up to most interaction with mainstream, 'normie' society, where you are constantly asked to not believe your own lying eyes about the state of the world, about war, and politics, and crime, and the economy, and social issues, and family formation, and so on. The era is one of “state enforced aesthetic life stage”.

The trough-line of private social problems between men and women, as well as immigration and "the world as economic zones", is dehumanisation; seeing all humans as perfectly interchangeable. This is a product of being stuck in the aesthethic life.

If it was for someone's moral edification - if there was a child in my family, who was being instructed in social rituals and tradition, introduced to his cultural heritage and Christian life in some small way, there would be no friction, no joker-tension between name and content. But because there is not, the rituals are inversed, and we don't sacrifice ourselves aesthetically by acting in silly ways, playing silly game, for the moral ends of “raising the next generation”, but instead sacrifice the children for their parents sake. We have done this for a while now, but now it has gotten truly bizarre and out of hand. For a while there was a plausible debiability grey area, where you could pretend 'oh this is just a weird little intermission period". But I am 33 years old, my brother is older. At my age my parents had all the children they will ever have. If we cannot speak honestly about this to each other, we cannot speak. There is nothing to talk about. And if I indulge their aesthethic gratification, of playing along with these rituals, despite their claiming it's what they want, I am doing moral harm to them, as well as myself.

The situation is nothing less than perverse, and I am being asked to help them lie to themselves, and to me. And the reason it hurts is because it is fundamentally, structurally, inescapably tragic, tragedy. To continue to pretend otherwise, to satisfy “rituals”, is perverse. At least is if I do it, because I would be doing it knowingly.

My father has shacked up with a woman my age, because she has a child he can treat as the grandchildren he doesnt have, and despite this, there is a way in which we could still have a relationship, but it requires that we both operate on a moral level, and can have an honest communication about it. And he has adopted this new, interchangeable family, exactly to avoid this. I have worried all my life about being selfish and neurotic and unfair, and I have worried about whether I am “forcing him to choose between me and them” - an unbearable picture, to me. An unbearable aesthethic. I couldnt tolerate being “someone who does that”. It’s bad look. yikes.

But I don't think that's accurate. I think he already has chosen, and the only moral action left to me, the only moral action I can do, to him, is respecting his choice. I was going to Confront him about this, about how much it hurts me when he tries to tell me about how much he loves his adopted grandchildren, two girlfriends ago. By now there is no more room for excuses and doubt and plausible deniability. She is an aesthetic picture to him, interchangeable, as is her child. Only God can help them now.

For twenty years the story has gone: I am the weird one. I am the problem. Randy gets morose and weird, he has 'depression', he is the problem. We have done nothing wrong, he is just a victim, a poor thing, and we are being kind and generous to HIM. No more. That's not the story any more. 20 years is enough. I am not a poor sport about my life, but I will not carry everyone else’s mistakes. I would if I could. I can’t.

If Heidegger and myself are right about death-awareness being Sentience, then a near death experience is being jump-started into the kierkegaardian moral life stage, forced into taking life seriously whether you like it or not.

The important thing here, the point of it all is, if your life feels like a tragedy, and you are confused and disoriented and don't know where to start, you are most likely in some way suspending the ethical for the aesthetic. Perhaps you have similar family circumstances, perhaps you have a bad friend, perhaps you are a bad friend to yourself. Perhaps you sacrifice the ethical to achieve some idealized picture of yourself as a wounded artists, a heroic victim. The noble beauty of defeat: all alcoholics are aesthetes, trying to paint a beautiful picture. A famous recent public example, this is why Mr Hunter Biden records himself smoking crack in a sensory deprivation tank. "self portrait of a failed artist". I know because I did the same thing.

It is imperative that you understand that you are not a failed artist, nobly going unrecognized, sacrificing yourself body and soul to create these beautiful little pictures. You make bad art. It’s shit. The stuff you make it terrible. It has no value, it only has meaning to you. You are a bad artist. But you could be a decent man.