The scene is a well-appointed drawing room in Copenhagen in September 1840. A fresh-faced girl in her late teens is playing the piano in an attempt to soothe the troubled spirit of her boyfriend, a slender, bouffant-haired philosopher by the name of Søren Kierkegaard. Suddenly, he grabs the score from her and claps its pages shut before exclaiming, ‘Oh! What do I care for music? It’s you I want!’ Upon which, he proposes marriage, and soon afterwards, the young Regine Olsen accepts.
Immediately, Kierkegaard has second thoughts. Being an existentialist, he doesn’t deal in doubts of the casual kind. His are devastating. When Regine bumps into him in the street a few days later, he is so physically altered that she doesn’t recognise him. He agonises in his diary. Is marriage really for him? Will it get in the way of his vocation, which is to write world-changing philosophical tomes? It takes him a full 13 months to make up his mind. At length, in October 1841, he ends things with Regine, takes back his engagement ring, and flees to Berlin.
So far, you may feel, so typical. You just can’t trust a continental philosopher. Yet in a couple of key respects, Kierkegaard breaks the mould. For one thing, he writes supremely well, with tremendous wit and vigour. For another, one of his key ideas, which he developed in response to his own quarter-life crisis, feels as relevant today as it did 200 years ago.
Kierkegaardian stage theory—the idea that we naturally pass through three life stages, the aesthetic, the ethical and the spiritual—provides a lens through which not only to understand our own lives but also to interpret on a deeper level many of our most beloved fictional stories, from the Iliad and Hamlet to The Godfather and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
In the aesthetic stage, the theory goes, we’re self-absorbed. We write poetry and go out partying. It’s all about us. The ethical stage turns us inside out, so we live less for ourselves and more for other people. We might marry and have children, caring more about their comfort than our own. We might employ people in a business or engage in civic duties. This ultimately gives way to the spiritual stage. The kids have left home. Retirement beckons. We become less engaged in worldly things and more interested in religion or abstract philosophical thought.
In fiction, the secret story is nearly always a painful transition from the aesthetic to the ethical stage. Take Bridget Jones, or for that matter, the protagonist of almost every romantic comedy. Her struggle is to overcome her sense of having left it too late, and to progress from the limitations of single life to the rewards and responsibilities of marriage. Ditto Harry in When Harry Met Sally, whose default setting is detached male narcissism, and who only learns slowly, through painful experience, that there’s another way to be.
This kind of commitment phobia—or, to give it its Kierkegaardian name, the struggle to move from the aesthetic to the ethical life—now seems more prevalent than ever. A new book connects it with the compulsive self-curation of social media, which has caused a spike in perfectionist attitudes. Perfectionism leads to procrastination, according to Jump! A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination by Prof. Simon May. The data appears to back him up, showing a general trend to get married much later, if at all, and to change jobs far more often.
Prof. May argues that Kierkegaard’s own romantic-comedy crisis—you might picture him as a 19th-century Danish equivalent of Hugh Grant’s dithering character in Four Weddings and a Funeral—carries lessons for those prone to procrastination. It sounds counterintuitive, but the pain of hesitation, and even the later sting of regret, can be an unavoidable part of decision-making. By that rationale, the philosopher, like Billy Crystal’s Harry, has to suffer before he can understand. This chimes with the advice of creativity guru Jim Kroft, a singer-songwriter who counsels his thousands of online followers on how to break productivity blocks. As he tells me, ‘The problem is, stuckness comes for a reason. It is asking us to be here, to deal first with things as they are. The toughest thing is doing just that, to accept that you have to exist within your circumstances, before you can then move forward out of them.’
Hard to hear, but this sounds true. In the case of Kierkegaard, his year of living in uncertainty ushered in a period of astonishing creativity. Above all, during those bleak months in Berlin, after he had broken his own heart, he completed a draft of his first cast-iron masterpiece, the appealing, freewheeling, many-voiced literary monster that is Either/Or (1843). As much an experimental novel as a philosophical treatise, the book purports to be a collection of papers by a range of different authors, all of whom Kierkegaard actually invented.
Its central theme, embodied in its title, is the dilemma of choosing between an aesthetic and an ethical life, because both have their pros and cons. Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard, his inclination is to emphasise the cons, most famously in a highly entertaining passage of Scandinavian miserabilism. “Marry and you will regret it,” he warns his readers, like a half-drunk uncle at a wedding reception. But then he continues, “Don’t marry and you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry—you will regret it, either way.”
In later works such as Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Kierkegaard develops the dilemma into a trilemma. This is where he includes the third option of the spiritual stage, which for him was about making a commitment to God. To complicate matters, these ways of living are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible for one person, for instance, to embody all three to differing degrees. Yet we’re left with the sense of a natural progression. The young person lives, and should live, an aesthetic life. In middle age, they ideally progress to an ethical way of living. At length, this gives way to the spiritual stage of detachment from life, which helpfully makes life easier, in the end, to part with. The spiritual stage, then, is a gentle rehearsal for death.
The unworldly protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is arguably a spiritual-stage hero. But in the main, as we’ve seen, protagonists are most often making, or struggling to make, the transition from the first to the second stage. This holds true not only in rom-coms but in every genre. In The Godfather, for example, Michael Corleone must shoulder the ethical-stage burden of the family business. In the TV show Succession, the trauma of the younger Roys is that their domineering father won’t let them make that Kierkegaardian transition.
Make the move too early or too late and you run into trouble. Romeo and Juliet, arguably, try too early. They’re children inspired by love to act like adults, which helps explain why they make such catastrophically poor decisions. Hamlet, like the Roys, is trapped in the limbo between stages. He’s blocked by his uncle’s manoeuvrings from taking his rightful place as king.
In real life, too, it’s easy—indeed it’s now easier than ever—to think of people who struggle with the transit between stage one and stage two: the eternal singleton, for example, locked in a cycle of diminishing aesthetic returns, or the friend who, having married young, chafes against the limits of their ethical life. For all Kierkegaard’s faults as a fiancé, we owe him a debt of gratitude for enduring his year of angst, on the back of which he built his three-stage scaffolding of thought for understanding such predicaments.
Prof. May and Jim Kroft may be right to suggest that pain is often a necessary part of the process. But the way I see it, if you can navigate Kierkegaard’s stages skilfully, and with the right instinctive timing, you can turn his depressive dictum on its head. When you are single, you will be happy. And when you marry, you will be happy. Unmarried or married—you will be happy, either way.
