Historians of philosophy are like painters; by giving an interpretation of another philosopher’s problems and concepts, they paint philosophical portraits. SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan paints such a portrait of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his new monograph, Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Interesting: The Aesthetic Gulf in “Either/Or” I, published this summer by Rowman & Littlefield.
Composed in two volumes in 1843, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or portrays two extreme views on life. The first is focused purely on aesthetics — the study of beauty, human taste, and judgment — and the other is concerned only with ethics and community. In Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Interesting, Eagan guides readers through the “immensely difficult” Either/Or I, and shows how a pursuit of aesthetics at the expense of ethics and objectivity can lead to monomaniacal self-interest.
“The book is about the historical development of aesthetics from around 1750 to 1840 as a philosophical response to Newtonian science. Key philosophers like Immanuel Kant held that morality is rooted in human agency, and that without free will we lose our dignity. Newtonian science, on the other hand, depicted a clockwork universe,” says Eagan. “The concept of the interesting — an opposition between what we see and what is potentially concealed behind appearances — has the quality of ongoingness: as we dig deeper and deeper, we find new phenomena that need further explanation. The interesting is the driving aesthetic of scientific discovery.”
As Eagan describes, the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s volume is obsessed with finding deeper and deeper interpretations of the human condition, until he reaches a point of despair. He begins to decay morally, to deceive others, and to abandon any efforts to engage with reality. The solipsistic path can yield ruinous moral consequences. And this is exactly Eagan’s take on Kierkegaard: that an exclusively aesthetic approach to life opens the abyss depicted in Either-Or.
Though it is not his main project at SFI, Eagan has been working on the monograph during his time as a research fellow. “I’m at SFI in part because of my interest in the relation between aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and science.“ says Eagan. “In collaborating with David Krakauer, I have come to believe even more strongly that science and aesthetics cannot be disentangled. And though philosophy does not have the same methods as science, nor the same levels of objective verification, I have tried to apply a level of rigor to the relevant evidence equivalent to what I see in the more scientific work of my colleagues.”
Either/Or is an important foundation for understanding Kierkegaard’s later works, says Eagan. And those later works are just as relevant today as they were when they were written, even, or perhaps especially, in science. “Science and philosophy have always fed one another,” says Eagan. “Philosophers benefit from being deeply in touch with science, and scientists from being deeply in touch with philosophy.”