Sometimes despair begins with a moment of clarity: suddenly, we see through the life we have been living. It is not necessarily the despair of suffering, poverty or obvious misfortune. On the contrary, it can emerge precisely when life appears to be going well.

We may have a good job, a loving relationship, a comfortable home, beautiful things around us, holidays to look forward to and enough pleasurable distractions to keep the days occupied. And yet, something interrupts the seamlessness of it all. For a moment, the things we have been pursuing appear strangely insignificant. The goals remain, the routines continue and all the external signs of a successful life are still there, but their meaning seems to have slipped away.

It can be an unsettling realisation, because nothing necessarily needs to have gone wrong. There may be no obvious crisis to explain the feeling. Instead, something that was previously invisible has become visible: the possibility that the life being lived is not quite the same as the life one has consciously chosen.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was deeply concerned with this condition, and his analysis of despair is closely connected to the problem of becoming a self. For Kierkegaard, we are not simply born as fully realised selves. We are born with the possibility of becoming ourselves, but that possibility has to be fulfilled through consciousness, choice and engagement. The immediate human being exists before this process of self-realisation has taken place; there is being, but there is not yet the conscious relation to oneself that allows one to become a self.

And this is precisely where the problem begins. Once the life we have been living becomes visible to us, we can no longer take its assumptions quite so easily for granted. The choices, ambitions and desires that once seemed self-evidently our own may begin to look very different.

Kierkegaard gives this condition a particular name: the Philistine.

The Philistine

The Philistine believes that he is choosing his own life, yet much of what he takes to be personal choice has already been determined by the world around him. What appears to be individual decision-making is shaped by what Kierkegaard understands as anonymous forces: social conventions, economic structures, cultural expectations and the unwritten rules governing what a person in a particular position is supposed to want.

(Of course the Philistine is not necessarily a man, but this is how Kierkegaard describes him.)

In other words, the Philistine experiences life as a series of personal choices, without necessarily recognising how much of the choice has already been shaped by the world in which he lives. The possibilities available to him, and even the things he comes to desire, are influenced by social conventions, economic structures and expectations about what a person in his position should want. What appears to be a freely chosen life can therefore be the result of forces that remain largely invisible precisely because they have become so familiar.

A businessman, for example, may decide to open a branch in the next town and experience this as an entirely personal decision, while his choice is simultaneously being shaped by economic forces and the laws of supply and demand. Likewise, choosing where to spend a summer holiday may feel like a matter of individual preference, while the destination itself is influenced by the social expectations attached to his position and the kind of life he is expected to lead. The choice is real, but the field within which the choice is made has already been structured by forces outside the individual.

The remarkable thing about the Philistine is that this does not necessarily make him unhappy.

He may even be very happy!

He might have a good job, a loving spouse, children, a beautiful home, nice furniture, fine clothes, a good car and holidays to look forward to. There is nothing obviously wrong with this life, and Kierkegaard’s point is not that pleasure or material comfort are inherently meaningless. The problem is that the Philistine has become dependent upon these external conditions for his sense of self. If everything is stripped away, there is nothing underneath to fall back upon. Absolutely nothing! His happiness is dependent upon visible success, social recognition and external fortune.

The Philistine has, in this sense, lost himself to the world around him. His desires, ambitions and choices have become so entangled with external expectations that he experiences them as his own, and because this way of living is familiar, there may be little reason to question it. The machinery of everyday life simply keeps moving.

But what happens when, for a moment, the machinery becomes visible?

The realisation does not necessarily arrive as a dramatic crisis. It can appear in the middle of an entirely ordinary day, almost as an interruption in the flow of things. One might suddenly stop amidst the bustle of work, errands, conversations and obligations and experience, with an unsettling clarity, the sense that all of this striving is somehow pointless. The goals that seemed so important only moments before can suddenly appear strangely indifferent, as though their significance was something we had simply agreed to believe in. What seemed like a meaningful direction can collapse into a feeling of vanity, repetition or emptiness.

For Kierkegaard, this moment matters because it creates a possibility that was not visible before: the possibility of seeing one’s own existence from a distance. The person who has always been immersed in life is, momentarily, able to step outside it and look back at the patterns that have been guiding them. The familiar becomes strange, and with that estrangement comes the unsettling recognition that the life being lived may not be the life one has consciously chosen.

There is, however, no guarantee that anything will follow from this recognition. The moment can simply be dismissed. One can return to work, fill the evening with entertainment, buy something new, open a bottle of wine, make another plan or find some other distraction capable of covering the feeling again. The machinery can be allowed to start running as before.

But perhaps the feeling remains.

Perhaps, instead of immediately trying to silence it, one allows the question to stay: If all of this suddenly seems empty, then what am I actually living for?

This is the point at which the Philistine can become the Aesthete. The recognition of emptiness has broken the unquestioned confidence in the given reality, but it has not yet provided an alternative. The Aesthete is therefore born from a kind of awakening, but it is an awakening that initially brings despair rather than resolution. Having seen through the conventional life, the Aesthete can no longer simply return to it with the same innocence. But what should take its place?

The Aesthete

The Aesthete emerges from this recognition. One has seen through the emptiness of the Philistine existence and become conscious of the gap between the life one is living and the possibility of a life that might actually be one’s own. The goals, conventions and ambitions that once appeared meaningful are exposed as contingent, and one can no longer accept them simply because they are familiar or socially prescribed. One has stepped outside the given reality, but has not yet found anything with which to replace it.

This is what makes the Aesthete’s despair so peculiar. There is a rejection of the emptiness of the conventional life, but no real alternative! He has not yet discovered what could give life substance instead.

And so begins the search for intensity rather than meaning. The Aesthete turns toward experience, seeking those moments capable of expanding the ordinary: beautiful lovers, luxurious experiences, delicious meals, beautiful objects, and everything else capable of producing pleasure, stimulation or excitement. The world becomes a succession of possibilities, each one offering a temporary escape from the emptiness that has been recognised.

But there is a problem at the heart of this existence: pleasure depends upon novelty. What is interesting must remain interesting, and the moment something becomes familiar, its ability to produce pleasure begins to diminish. The Aesthete therefore becomes engaged in a perpetual struggle against boredom. It is not idleness that is threatening, but the possibility that nothing will remain sufficiently interesting to distract from the emptiness that has already been discovered.

This produces a life characterised by volatility and consumption.

The newly acquired object is exciting precisely because it is new. The new experience provides pleasure because it has not yet become familiar. The new lover remains interesting because the relationship has not yet settled into the obligations and familiarity of devotion. The new destination remains enchanting because it has not yet become ordinary.

But the moment of devotion, familiarity or repetition threatens the aesthetic experience itself.

Kierkegaard illustrates this particularly well through Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or. Johannes does not simply desire a young woman called Cordelia; he becomes absorbed in the elaborate process of making her his object of desire. He carefully constructs the seduction, cultivating anticipation, uncertainty and distance, and turns the entire process into an aesthetic experience. What matters to him is not simply the moment of possessing her, but the poetic reality he creates around the possibility of possessing her.

This is why the moment of fulfilment is also the moment at which his interest begins to disappear. Once Cordelia has surrendered herself to him, the possibility has become actuality, and the tension that sustained his desire is gone. The woman who was fascinating while she remained a possibility becomes, once possessed, strangely uninteresting. Johannes therefore leaves her almost immediately after achieving what he appeared to want. His desire was sustained by the distance between himself and the object of his desire; once that distance disappears, so does the fascination.

The same mechanism can, remarkably, be transferred from relationships to objects. The newly acquired product can function in much the same way as Cordelia: before possession, it exists as a possibility, carrying with it anticipation, fantasy and the promise of a new experience. Once it enters our lives, however, the distance disappears. The object becomes familiar, and familiarity gradually strips away the excitement that made it desirable in the first place. When the glittering surface of the new begins to fade, the Aesthete becomes bored and starts looking elsewhere.

And suddenly Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century Aesthete feels unexpectedly relevant to contemporary consumption! The endless succession of new objects, experiences and possibilities can be understood as an expanded version of the same aesthetic logic: we do not simply desire the thing itself, but the anticipation surrounding it, and once anticipation gives way to familiarity, we begin searching for something new.

Endless replacement

The problem with a life organised around novelty is that novelty is inherently temporary. The new object becomes the familiar object. The exciting experience becomes yesterday’s experience. The beautiful thing becomes part of the background. What once seemed capable of transforming our lives becomes another thing among other things.

And so we begin searching again. 

What we are searching for, however, is rarely just another object. We are searching for the feeling that surrounded the previous one when it was still new: the anticipation, the sense of possibility, the small promise that this particular thing might alter something in our lives. The object becomes a vehicle for that anticipation, and for a while the promise is enough to sustain our interest. 

But once the object has entered our everyday reality, the promise is gradually replaced by familiarity.

This helps explain why an object can lose its appeal long before it has lost its usefulness. Nothing may be wrong with it. It still works, still serves its purpose, and may even still be beautiful, yet something has changed in our relationship to it. The object no longer opens up a field of possibility; it has become part of the familiar landscape of our lives. What once appeared full of promise has become ordinary, and the Aesthete experiences this ordinariness as boredom.

The impulse is therefore to replace it, not because the old object has failed, but because something new promises to restore the feeling that has disappeared. Another object can once again become fascinating precisely because it has not yet become familiar. Desire moves forward in anticipation, while satisfaction belongs to the moment in which anticipation ends. And so the cycle begins again: desire, acquisition, familiarity, boredom, and desire once more.

The same logic can be found beyond objects. We can consume places, experiences, relationships and even versions of ourselves according to the same principle. The moment something becomes too familiar, too predictable or too committed, it risks losing the very quality that made it attractive.

Enjoyment requires distance.

For the Aesthete, being too deeply involved in something threatens the experience of it. Love, for example, becomes problematic because genuine devotion requires engagement, whereas the seducer maintains the distance necessary to remain fascinated by the poetic dimension of the situation. The Aesthete creates a reality through storytelling and imagination, and it is often this constructed reality, rather than actuality itself, that becomes the source of pleasure.

And yes, there is something profoundly contemporary in this. We live in a world organised around keeping things interesting, constantly offering us another product, another experience, another aesthetic, another possibility. Everything can be refreshed, upgraded and replaced.

Perhaps the problem is not simply that we consume too much, but that we have forgotten how to remain with something once it becomes familiar.

Passion without direction

Kierkegaard’s Aesthete is, however, not simply a figure of superficial consumption. There is something valuable in the Aesthete-character that the Philistine lacks, and that is passion.

Philistines are absorbed in the business of life, but lack any genuine passion for what they are doing. Work becomes a means to leisure rather than something in which the individual is deeply engaged. The Aesthete, on the other hand, has experienced the intensity of passion.

The only problem is that this passion has nowhere to go!

Passion itself becomes a compelling drug: the possibility of becoming intensely engaged with life — through curiosity, imagination, and a desire for experiences that feel genuine. But without direction, passion can only sustain itself for so long. It can make life more intense without making it more meaningful, and so the Aesthete moves from one experience to another, continually searching for something capable of sustaining the feeling of being alive.

The difficulty is that any enduring goal begins to resemble the very world the Aesthete has rejected. To commit to a particular purpose, to a relationship, to a community or to a way of living means accepting something as worth choosing and remaining with. Yet the conventional goals of success, status and social recognition appear hollow precisely because the Aesthete has already seen through them. The Aesthete therefore feels caught in an uncomfortable position: returning to the prescribed goals of the Philistine is impossible, but so is finding an alternative toward which the passion can be directed.

And this is exactly what makes the aesthetic existence so unstable.

Possibility remains open, but nothing becomes sufficiently important to demand commitment. One can always move on to the next experience, the next person, the next object, the next possibility. There is freedom in this, but also despair, because without choosing something to which one can become genuinely devoted, passion keeps circulating without ever becoming a life.

This is perhaps the most interesting part of Kierkegaard’s analysis. The way out cannot simply be a return to the Philistine existence, as though one could forget the moment in which its emptiness became visible. Once one has seen through the given reality, that knowledge cannot simply be undone. 

You cannot unknow what you have come to know!

The question is therefore not how to return to the life one had before the realisation, but what to do with the realisation itself. The Aesthete has discovered that the conventional goals are insufficient. What remains to be discovered is that rejecting false goals is not the same as having no goals at all. Passion needs somewhere to go. It needs something capable of transforming possibility into commitment, experience into engagement, and the isolated individual into someone who is actually participating in a life.

This is where the movement beyond the aesthetic stage begins.

Beyond novelty

The Aesthete has escaped the Philistine’s unreflective conformity, but has not yet escaped despair. Having seen through the given reality and discovered that its prescribed goals are empty, the Aesthete finds that endless possibility offers no foundation either. At some point, possibility has to become choice! Something has to become important enough to be chosen, pursued and remained with.

This is where the question of authenticity begins, and where Kierkegaard’s next stage, the Ethicist, enters the picture.

The movement from the aesthetic to the ethical involves community engagement, but it is not a return to the Philistine world. It is a different kind of engagement. The Ethicist does not simply accept the goals handed down by society, but takes responsibility for choosing what is worth committing to. This is difficult precisely because commitment closes possibilities. To choose something is to choose against something else; to devote oneself to a relationship, a place, a practice, a vocation or a community is to give up the endless freedom of remaining open to everything else.

For the Aesthete, that openness is precisely where the pleasure lies. Possibility keeps desire alive because nothing has yet become fixed, familiar or final. But the same openness that preserves possibility also prevents anything from becoming deeply meaningful. If everything can always be replaced, nothing is given enough time to acquire weight.

Authenticity therefore requires more than the freedom to choose. It requires the willingness to choose something and stay.

This has consequences for the way we relate to the material world as well. An object can become meaningful through time, and its significance can deepen precisely because it becomes familiar. Scratches, repairs and traces of use can become part of its aesthetic character because the object gradually becomes entangled with the life of the person who owns it. What begins as an attractive thing can, through years of use, become a carrier of memory, experience and attachment.

Its value no longer lies in being new. It lies in having become ours.

This is a different kind of aesthetic experience, one that begins where novelty ends. It asks us to remain attentive after the initial fascination has disappeared and to discover what familiarity might reveal that novelty could not. Beauty does not necessarily reach its highest point at the moment of acquisition; sometimes it begins there, and only becomes richer through use, care, memory and time.

The Aesthete keeps searching for the next interesting thing because the present thing has become ordinary. The Ethicist begins to discover that ordinary does not necessarily mean insignificant, and that meaning may require precisely the thing the Aesthete finds most difficult: staying. Perhaps this is exactly what is missing from so much of our contemporary pursuit of novelty. We have become exceptionally good at finding new possibilities, but much less practiced in allowing anything to become sufficiently important that we remain with it long enough for it to change us.

The Aesthete’s despair is therefore not simply a desire for too much pleasure, beauty or experience. It is the despair of passion without direction, and of possibility without commitment. The recognition of emptiness is necessary because without seeing through the given reality, there can be no movement beyond it. But seeing through one way of living is only the beginning.

The question is what we choose to do once we have seen.