Aesthetes aren’t hot—they’re cold as ice.
College, Kierkegaard, and the desire to do bad, beautiful things
Dear Readers,
This week, I am sharing with you some thoughts on a mode of living I found seductive in the past. Next week, I will tell about a writer’s gathering that took place this weekend in my little town. This week’s story is about solipsism—self-protection. Next week’s will be about connection—self-sharing.
xo,
Amelia
On a partial reread of Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” I was struck by the chapter on Eros. Bloom’s main tune was complaining about the lack of passion and fire in the modern-day studentry. But he also spent a page or two reminiscing about his own college days.
“[The students’] lust was mixed into everything they thought and did. They were painfully aware that they wanted something but were not quite sure exactly what it was, what form it would take and what it all meant. The range of satisfactions intimated by their desire moved from prostitutes to Plato, and back, from the criminal to the sublime.” (CotAM, 137)
Wow, I thought. That sounds like me. And most of America. Modern storytelling glamorizes the personal quest for self-fulfillment, “finding yourself” through one-night stands and dabbling in vaguely exotic religious practices. Social media in particular is all about the aesthetic. By default, my generation is a generation of aesthetes.
But why does Bloom criticize the younger generations for their lack of fire? Isn’t the aesthetic life all about sex and passion and transgression? Well, considering Gen Z is both highly aesthetic and paralyzed by fear and anxiety, perhaps those two things aren’t incompatible.
What is an aesthete?
In my sophomore year of college, I took a seminar on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. We sat around a long table, cold afternoon sunshine casting shadows from a high window, and discussed. It wasn’t logical propositions that occupied us but a colorful cast of characters—Johannes the Seducer, The Knight of Infinite Resignation, Zarathustra, Lou Salome with a whip, Judge Wilhelm, and A.
A. was the one I resonated with, which is funny, considering that’s my first initial. Besides the fact that A. was male and created in the 19th century, he might as well have been me. A. was the aesthete.
An aesthete is someone who loves and appreciates works of art and beautiful things. (Collins English Dictionary)
While it’s healthy to incorporate a sense of beauty into one’s life, A. makes it very clear that he lives for the aesthetic. And aesthetic pleasure is profoundly amoral. A good story, or painting, or symphony contains an interplay of darkness and light. The aesthete thus seeks out the darkest in human experience as well as the loveliest. Suffering and pleasure are savored equally because they are equally stimulating. What drives the aesthete, then, are not principles of good and evil but that same lust that Bloom described in his college experience, the lust that ranges “from the criminal to the sublime.” And lust is always, at its root, about power.
A. himself draws attention to this:
“If I had in my service a submissive djinn who, when I asked for a glass of water, would bring me the world's most expensive wines, deliciously blended, in a goblet, I would dismiss him until he learned that the enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.” (A., Either/Or)
The aesthete’s fatal error is that his world has no room in it for other people. His lust for a variety of interesting pleasures turns everything and everyone else in the world into a tasty morsel to sate his appetite. A. was too full of existential angst to really do anyone harm (much like most Zoomers). But A’s shadow is the Marquis de Sade.
“My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.” (Marquis de Sade, Juliette)
The Marquis did indeed set fire to every “object” in its path (the “objects” were usually what most people refer to as “human beings”). I don’t know much about him, but it should say something that one so curious as myself doesn’t want to know more than I already do. Unlike A., the Marquis not only desired power—he possessed it. And like Jeffrey Epstein and all those other evil men, he took advantage of his power to devour and dehumanize.
When I imagine the Marquis, I see a tongue licking its lips.
Aesthetes act nonchalant, but they’re secretly control freaks.
So, that’s the primary mood of the aesthete—consumption. Dehumanization.
But what I realized after my own college stint with aestheticism is that the aesthete is motivated as much by fear as by greed. After all, one side effect of allowing other people to be people, giving them as much agency as yourself, is that they become threats.
I remember feeling threatened by men, not by their strength but by their willingness to lay their hearts at my feet. I wanted love but not with that exclusivity, that burning intensity. That kind of love was too painful to enter into willingly. I wondered, “Why can't we be made of steel, not this squishy, bread-dough stuff?” And I decided to be like steel. To feed my sense of romance, I delighted in the chase but never let it reach its intended conclusion. I decided to spin beautiful caterpillar-pipe smoke, blue and purple philosophy fumes fraught with flirtation, run around at night and have strange adventures in strange places with strange people. I told myself I would be a warm home for no one.
And yet, sitting in my dorm room alone, I grew wistful. “My dorm is cold, blue, and concrete - like an embellished sculpture of an ice cube. I want to spend my whole life surrounded by wood and the smell of wood and the stuff wood soaks in - like firesmoke, and oils, and the rub of human skin.” As an aesthete, I sought a solution that would fulfill this desire while maintaining my position at the top of the food chain: “All I want is the warmth of human souls burning in my hearth, my head. I'm quite a vampire, greedy for the sap of souls.”
What this vampirism meant, in practical terms, was flirting. In Either/Or, A.’s beliefs are carried to their dark conclusion in “The Diary of The Seducer,” in which the protagonist reflects on and justifies his cold-blooded seduction of a maiden, taking sadistic pleasure in manipulating her heart. This is stereotypical. We invariably imagine a seducer as male, and if female, we still imagine it as a sex thing. But in the aesthete’s case, it might not be. The point of conquest is not to satisfy bodily urges but to direct a beautiful drama. The aesthete thus maintains control as both the director and leading actor in a play. And with this set-up she inevitably manages to make herself look pretty cool.
Sprezzatura: studied nonchalance : graceful conduct or performance without apparent effort (Merriam Webster)
The aesthete’s trap
This sounds ideal, but it rarely works out well. Proverbs warns about the seductress but also warns the seductress of her own peril. First, she is ignorant of her own lack of direction: “her paths wander aimlessly, but she does not know it” (Proverbs 5:6). Second, she ends up being caught in her own trap: “the iniquities of a wicked man entrap him; the cords of his sin entangle him” (5:22). Together, these paint the picture of a laughingstock, the kind of person who thinks she’s so clever for setting a tripwire, but ends up forgetting where she laid it and falling flat on her face.
Quickly, I realized the aesthete’s strength was her biggest weakness. I was so used to protecting myself that I never got any practice at learning to love. “I don't understand how to really care for other people in an earthy, skin-on-skin, shoulder-to-shoulder, grunt-work kinda way,” I wrote. “I'm didactic and cold and Platonic and a pretty glass fairy.”
To remain forever in a state of erotic suspension like Bloom’s eternal students, “painfully aware that they wanted something but not quite sure exactly what it was” ends up hardening the heart. It’s a numbing sort of spicy, like Szechuan peppercorns (which are admittedly delicious.) Reducing all people and things to morsels of experience in a search for erotic fulfillment ends up dehumanizing the aesthete himself.
I think that’s an underexplored axis of the Golden Rule. One unspoken reason behind the maxim “Treat others as you would like to be treated” is that you will eventually begin treating yourself the same way you treat others. Hannah Arendt observed that dictators “do not care whether they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born.” The dark blade of their ruthlessness is directed not only towards others but towards themselves. Our attitudes towards others mirror our attitudes towards ourselves. Or vice versa. One always informs the other.
If you treat others as things to be used and discarded, justice will bring things full circle so that you also begin to see yourself in commercial terms. Like Proverbs says, you’ll fall into your own trap. If you deny others love, you will always deny it to yourself. Your heart will freeze, and you will die alone.
Cheers.
So, that’s why I’m no longer an aesthete.
And shame on Allan Bloom for romanticizing it.
Question for You: Do you find aestheticism attractive? Why? Or are other lifestyle philosophies more alluring? What are they—the rigors of asceticism, the ironical pose of cynicism, or something that can’t be described by an “-ism?”
Further reading on aestheticism as a lifestyle:
Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard (1843)
“The Marble Statue” by Joseph von Eichendorff (1818)
Faust by Goethe (1832)
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
If you have any reading to suggest, do let me know in the comments. Mine is rather 19th century.