[...] Wanting despair, despairing, means recognizing that something has to change, and that means changing despair from a state that one is in (with or without knowing it) to a self-chosen act; and with that choice the individual leaes despair behind (for he has thereby taken on the task of becoming). As the ethicist writes: 'in order truly to despair, a person must truly will it; but when he truly wills it, he is truly beyond despair'.

This 'apriority' of action means that the individual realizes that he is both the person who acts and who he becomes through that action.

[...] Kierkegaard, like Sartre, regards human existence as characterized by the tension between what one is and what one still has to become (as we know, Sartre calls these aspects facticity and transcendence). For Kierkegaard, becoming a self means relating both aspects of human-reality to each other, constantly bringing them into 'synthesis'. He calls these two aspects the gift and task of human existence. [...]

The aesthete does not realize this task. His reality 'is only possibility', and he wants to keep it that way; everything has to remain possible at all times for the aesthete. The ironic-aesthetic attitude is a flight for the responsibility from the becoming of one's existence: to redeem his task, the individual cannot just remain (non-committal) possibility, but has to freely determine himself, that is, realize himself as a positivity, an actuality.

[...] ethical self-becoming, as the constant relating of gift and task, is a process that is never finished; the ethical view is not something that one arrives at, after which one is done, and no unclarity and aesthetic confusion remain. [...]

He had to build a wall around each second just to make it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second--less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.

The aesthete is afraid of being bored, tries fervently to occupy his oversaturated mind with all kinds of distractions, but inevitably ends up being bored. This is what we might call the double nature of boredom: it encompasses both the individual's basic, languid state of apathy, as well as the frenetic attempts that he might make, out of boredom, to distract himself from that state. Kierkegaard thus concludes: 'Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut'. The ironic inability to commit to something causes an absolute emptiness. Try as the aesthete might, all his attempts at distraction, at 'poetic' variation, lead back to boredom [...]

[...] Boredom is the confrontation with the nothingness of aesthetic existence, and, as such, is connected to what Kierkegaard famously calls anxiety. While fear is always directed at a (supposedly) specific aspect of the world (snakes, heights, the monster under the bed), the object of anxiety is nothingness: it is directed at the undetermined situation of the individual, his freedom to form himself. Anxiety is the realization of the groundlessness of the individual, the realization that he is not automatically himself, but has to become a self, as the product of choices for which he is solely responsible. Boredom has the same nothingness as its source, only the bored individual does not yet seem fully pervaded (or 'anxiety-struck') by the existential task that this nothingness represents.