From EITHER/OR (1843)
On mood.
“The person who lives esthetically tries as far as possible to be engrossed completely in mood. He tries to bury himself completely in it so that nothing remains in him that cannot be modulated into it…. The dimmer the presence of the personality in the mood, the more the individual is in the instant…. This accounts for the enormous fluctuations to which one who lives esthetically is exposed.
The person who lives ethically is also familiar with mood, but for him it is not the highest; because he has chosen himself infinitely, he sees his mood beneath him. The ‘more’ that refuses to be absorbed in mood is precisely the continuity that to him is the highest.”
As is well known, Kierkegaard’s 1843 opus Either/Or consists of two overarching parts—the first a series of papers attributed to an aesthete called “A,” the second an epistolary response to “A” ascribed to a married civil servant referred to as Judge William. The above passage is taken from the Judge’s writings, and it indicates some of the main contours of his life-view. As he sees it, the Romantic-poetic self is caught up in immediacy, living “in the instant.” Now happy, now melancholic, now nervous, now comfortable, this self exists in accordance with external circumstances. The aesthete, like a person scrolling through the iPhone’s panoply of emojis, is always potentially in a different mood (Stemning). Yet, for the Judge, this is the very danger of the aesthetic sphere of existence: one never transcends mood but, instead, is immersed in it. Only the eternal goals of ethical and religious existence are capable of freeing the self from a subservience to mood.