A young aesthete fills his days with seduction, opera, and the cultivation of interesting moods, believing the highest art of living is to keep every possibility open and every commitment at bay. Sren Kierkegaard's 1843 work, published under a cascade of pseudonyms, stages the confrontation between two modes of existence: the aesthetic, which lives in the moment and fears boredom above all, and the ethical, which chooses commitment and accepts the weight of time. The first volume dazzles with its analysis of Don Giovanni and a seducer's diary; the second answers with a judge's letters on marriage and duty. Kierkegaard, nursing a broken engagement at twenty-nine, gave philosophy the texture of a lived struggle with what it means to choose.