The Failure of the Aesthetic Life: 09-03-2025

1. There is a call to lead an aesthetic or Epicureanism lifestyle; however, it is inevitably insufficient to meet the complexity and depth of life.
2. The aesthetic life is oriented toward physical, social, and mental pleasures, including beauty, friendships, and intellectual pursuits such as analysis and reasoning. It requires variation to keep from becoming boring and vapid due to the friction of repetition.
3. The aesthetic life views existence as a spectacle or theater of the absurd, choosing to be a detached observer, and eschewing attachments or commitments that might limit freedom. It has no hope in finding an ultimate meaning or purpose.
4. The aesthetic life inevitably leads to despair because pleasures don’t last, don’t sustain the self, and are mainly external. Once novelties fade and become harder to create or find, the aesthete is left with emptiness, self-alienation, and a disconnected identity separated into expectations, pleasures, and disappointments.
5. The aesthetic life fails life’s demands by prioritizing the finite and immediate over the infinite and eternal, and any deep, unifying commitment to an identity in relation to the highest and absolute, which are ultimately unavoidable encounters of conscious living.

For more information, read Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and later works.