Choosing a way of life › What the aesthetic means here

In everyday language, aesthetic can mean a concern with beauty or artistic form. The book's contrast concerns something wider: the orientation of a life. A person can make enjoyment or the interesting the organizing concern of their relation to experience. Art appreciation alone would not establish that they live in this way.

The judge offers a compact distinction. The aesthetic is that by which someone is immediately what they are, while the ethical concerns how they become what they become. He is contrasting a life received as a set of tendencies with a task of responsible formation. The contrast belongs to his argument, not to an established psychological classification of human beings.

Immediacy in this account need not mean an absence of intelligence. A can reflect elaborately on experience. His writing can be highly cultivated. The difficulty the judge identifies is whether reflection has become a way of avoiding the responsibility of choosing, rather than a means of taking it up.

This prevents a crude division between people who enjoy art and people who do their duty. The argument does not require the ethical person to become incapable of enjoyment. What changes is the place enjoyment has within a life. The issue is whether a passing attraction can always overrule the commitments through which someone takes responsibility for themselves.