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The Aesthete as a Failed Religious Man: Notes on the Aesthetic Conception of Existence in Either/Or, Part I by Søren Kierkegaard
(Original title: The Aesthete as a Failed Religious Man: Notes on the Aesthetic Conception of Existence in Either/Or, Part I by Søren Kierkegaard)
The article takes as a starting point Sergio Givone’s assertion that the aesthete is a religious man who has failed. Following this hypothesis, we see that, faced with the experience of boredom as the fundamental mood of the work, the aesthetic conception of existence leads to a practical method of discipline and detachment from the world similar to that of ascetic ideals. The Aesthete A is a failed religious man because he has lost the absolute and because, by transferring aesthetic categories to existence, what appears as the foundation of its method is a secularization of religious categories. The religiosity from which the aesthete distances himself is a monastic-aesthetic religion, that is to say, an aestheticizing religion. In this sense, the religion that appears on the horizon of Either/Or and the aesthetic position that is presented in the work are diverse expressions of the same phenomenon: the unhappy consciousness.
