{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029087261785356068, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.702857142857143, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Kierkegaard: The Limits of the Aesthetic

The ‘aesthetic’ is, for Kierkegaard, the condition in which most people live, a condition he explores through his ‘pseudonymous’ writings, in which his text is supposedly the product of an author other than himself. By such indirection, Kierkegaard is able both to work within the ‘aesthetic’ in his creation of a work of fiction and, at same time, to critique it. It was a technique first developed in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ section of Either/Or, whose plot is recapitulated in Spark’s The Bachelors. Kierkegaard’s fear of the power of the aesthetic is repeated in Spark’s novels, in which characters like Patrick Seton in The Bachelors or Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie try to aestheticise the world in which they live in order to gain control over it. The aesthetic offers them a false sense of having escaped from time into eternity, an escape that their author resists even when she herself cannot escape the aesthetic medium of her art.