One day, I noticed a volume of Kierkegaard writings in the lab breakroom.
It was sitting there between hardcovers that generations of well-intentioned people had left to dust in their uselessness, framed between a Matlab cookbook from the 2000’s and a massive Campbell Biology. As a good book hoarder, I decided to keep it (some would say steal), convinced I would be able to give it a better life.
No one would read Kierkegaard between two agarose gels, my conscience was telling me. I have never opened that book nor even thought about its content, until by chance I encountered Kierkegaard de novo in a coming-of-age short story about the difficult choice between the ethical and the aesthetic life [1].
Still deterred by the challenge to go through the original book, I decided instead to read a digest of the ethical/aesthetic by Jeff Mason [2], which despites its weird layout (some sentences are pasted twice in the text body), gives a secular take on the trinity ethical/aesthetic and religious, initially presented and developed by Kierkegaard in Either or Not, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety and The Concept of Dread. Humans experience anxiety when they are confronted with existentialist choices, i.e. these choices that orient life in one direction rather than another. Life choices can be rescinded in two categories which are either the aesthetic or the ethical. The aesthetic human lives for pleasure and for what is considered interesting until she or he experiences boredom. The ethical human lives for the others and for what is considered good, but is torn between duty and inclination. The aesthetic lives by its own set of rules. The ethical lives by those rules that are considered universal, standards enforced by society to ensure a good cohabitation between individuals. Reaching the limits of one of these two lines of conduct leads to despair. Conflict between these two mutually exclusive – maybe not so exclusive – categories leads to anxiety. Mason writes in these terms: “The problem of despair is a misrelation of the self to itself.”
These are, of course, archetypes. As it turns out, we, humans, are neither full aesthetes (concept that I personally flesh into a voluptuous Oscar Wilde) nor full ethical beings (that I transpose into an unbending, righteous Javert from Les Miserables). Neither way of living can bring balance between our own self and the others.
If we experience anxiety and despair because of existing conflicts between our aspirations, impulses, hidden desires and what we believe is meaningful, I wondered how this framework would be transposed to academia, that harbors a handful of anxious people.
It is frequent to read common pieces of life advice thrown on Science Twitter that promote fun experiences and cool science. This has always been puzzling (and stressful) to me, because of the impossibility to identify myself to the fun/cool culture that ought to characterize true scientists*. “Enjoy what you do” is a broad and vague requirement. Anyone who is reasonably masochistic will agree with me that having fun is not a synonym of hard labor, while at the same time reproducible science is undoubtedly generated by relentless work.
Thinking about these apparent contradictions, about the fact that there are, indeed, sparks of intense joy and satisfaction combined with daily frustration and weekly exhaustion, I thought that we, scientists, are small Kierkegaard experiments on the human condition. Anxiety and despair come from our conflicting views between fun and duty-based visions of science, from the requirement to develop our own vision while aligning partially on the standards of our community. We experience these dichotomies on a regular basis, maybe because science is such a mix of creativity and taylorism .
If academics constantly endure injuries to the self, what is the remedy to the roller-coaster? In his time, Kierkegaard recommended plain old faith (preferably Christian) as the way to get the right perspective on what is good and what is interesting. Mason gives it a secular riff:
The most philosophically acceptable formulation that Anti-Climacus** gives to describe the third way of self-relating is “to rest transparently in the power that supports you.” […] Stop thinking and remain awake. Think of nature and the physical universe on a level that does not contain either yourself or other people.
Reading that, I felt relieved. If the answer to the problem is transcendance, then we, scientists, are lucky bastards. The complexity of the subjects we barely scratch and the tiny conclusions we form are daily reminders that the world is vast and beyond our control, de facto infinitely interesting. Of course, troubleshooting an experimental protocol does not necessarily bring that little transcendance feeling. Reading instead a great piece of philosophical science*** can put all things – career promotion, broken pipettes and noisy data – back in perspective, holding anxiety at a manageable distance, at least for a hot minute.
NB: I am happy to replace the Kierkegaard book to its original owner and satisfy my ethical self.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/25/the-repugnant-conclusion
[2] https://philosophynow.org/issues/24/Soren_Kierkegaard
*Accentuated by the deforming lens of social networks.
**Alter-ego of Kierkeegard
***Comfort food is personal, but in my case I like Evolution and Tinkering (Jacob) or More is Different (Anderson).