ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of interpretations of the Kierkegaardian aesthetic as offering only a partial, and thus limited explanation of Kierkegaard's aesthetic. Kierkegaard's argumentative concern is to use the existential stages as categorical tactics that lead a reader to a greater awareness of the type of relation that determines one's selfhood. In the aesthetic stage, the aesthetic self relates to the existence through natural passion as in the desire for sensuous things alone or imaginative possibility rather than any ethical system or religious idea that must be actualized within existence. The ethical form of life is of a reflective, mediate existence in which one acts in time through a universal ethical system. The primary description of the aesthetic stage comes from Either/Or written by the pseudonym A and edited by Victor Eremita. Climacus suggests an ironic self is partially trapped or tilted towards either the demands of the aesthetic or ethical stage.
