ETHICS awareness of the possibility of achieving a higher, spiritual self Despair, so understood, is not a rare, but a well-nigh universal phenomenon Most men, in Kierkegaard’s expressive phrase, ‘pawn themselves to the world’ ‘They use their talents, accumulate money, carry on worldly affairs, calculate shrewdly etc., etc., are perhaps mentioned in history, but themselves they are not; spiritually understood they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything’ (SD 168) The first step towards a cure is the realization that one is in despair Already, in the hidden recesses of the aesthetic person’s happiness, there dwells an anxious dread Gradually, he may come to realize that his dissipation is a dispersal of himself He will be faced with the choice of abandoning himself to despair, or of moving upward by committing himself to an ethical existence The nature of such an existence, and the necessity for undertaking it, is spelt out most fully in the correspondence of Judge Vilhelm, the fictional author of the second part of Either/Or Vilhelm is himself a fully paid-up member of ethical society: he is happily married, the father of four children, and a civil court judge Unhappily for the reader, he also has a ponderous and repetitious manner of writing style, quite different from the witty and novelettish style with which Kierkegaard endowed the aesthetic author of Either/Or’s first part, who is now the recipient of the edifying letters Vilhelm goes to great lengths to express the contrast between the aesthetic and the ethical character, and sums it up in the following terms: We said that every aesthetic life-view was despair; this was because it was built upon what may or may not be That is not the case with the ethical life-view, for this builds life upon what has being as its essential property The aesthetic, we said, is that in which a person is immediately what he is; the ethical is that whereby a person becomes what he becomes (E/O 525) Kierkegaard attaches great importance to the concept of the self People often wish to have the talents or virtues of others; but they never seriously wish to be another person, to have a self other than their own (E/O 517) In the aesthetic stage, the self is undeveloped and undifferentiated; a morass of unrealized and conflicting possibilities: life is a hysterical series of experiments with no outcome The aesthete is in a state of permanent pregnancy: always in travail and never giving birth to a self To enter the ethical stage is 235