Fundamentally Kierkegaard suggested that there are two ways we can live our life, the aesthetic and the ethical. Each individual has the opportunity to make a conscious choice between these two.Individuals who choose the aesthetic viewpoint basically live for themselves and their own pleasure. This need not be a shallow attitude to life. In working for our own pleasure, we almost invariably work for the pleasure of others too, if we are thinking in the longer term. Indeed, it could be argued that the scientist who selflessly dedicates his entire life to curing a painful disease, sacrificing personal, domestic, and social pleasure in the process, is also living the aesthetic life if he does this simply because he enjoys scientific research.

On a basic level, the individual who lives the aesthetic life is not in control of his existence. He lives for the moment, prompted by pleasure. His life may be self-contradictory, lacking in stability or certainty. Even on a more calculating level, the aesthetic life remains "experimental." We follow a certain pleasure only so long as it appeals to us.

The inadequacy of the aesthetic viewpoint is fundamental. this is because it relies upon the external world. It "expects everything from without." In this way it is passive and lacking in freedom. It relies upon things that remain ultimately beyond the control of its will-- such as power, possessions, or even friendship. It is contingent, dependent upon the "accidental." There is nothing "necessary" about it.

If we understand such things, we see the ultimate inadequacy of the aesthetic existence. When an individual who lives the aesthetic life reflects on his existence, he soon realizes that it is lacking in any certainty or meaning. Such a realization often leads to despair.

Here subjectivity is the "absolute," and the foremost task is "choosing oneself." The individual who leads the ethical life creates himself by his choice, and self-creation becomes the goal of his existence. Where the aesthetic individual merely accepts himself as he is, the ethical individual seeks to know himself and to change himself by his own choice. He will be guided in this by his self-knowledge and his willingness not to accept what he discovers but to try to improve upon it.

Here we see the categorical difference between the aesthetic and the ethical: the former is concerned with the outer world, the latter with the inner. The ethical individual seeks to know himself and tries to turn himself into something better-- he aims at becoming an "ideal self."

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