Either/Or

Published in two volumes in 1843, Either/Or (original Danish title: Enten ‒ Eller) is an influential book written by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, exploring the aesthetic and ethical "phases" or "stages" of existence.

Either/Or portrays two life views, one consciously hedonistic, the other based on ethical duty and responsibility. Each life view is written and represented by a fictional pseudonymous author, the prose of the work depending on the life view being discussed. For example, the aesthetic life view is written in short essay form, with poetic imagery and allusions, discussing aesthetic topics such as music, seduction, drama, and beauty. The ethical life view is written as two long letters, with a more argumentative and restrained prose, discussing moral responsibility, critical reflection, and marriage. The views of the book are not neatly summarized, but are expressed as lived experiences embodied by the pseudonymous authors. The book's central concern is the primal question asked by Aristotle, "How should we live?" His motto comes from Plutarch, "The deceived is wiser than one not deceived.”

The esthetic is the personal realm of existence. Personally you have the possibility of the highest as well as the lowest. The ethical is the civic realm of existence. You can be oblivious to everything going on around you or you can get involved. An individual can go too far in these realms and lose sight of him/her self. Only religion can rescue the individual from these two realms arguing with each other all day long. The spirit has to awaken in the single individual and this book, Either and Or, is written to the single individual. Kierkegaard's challenge is for You to "discover a second face hidden behind the one you see" in yourself first, then in others.

The Middle Ages are altogether impregnated with the idea of representation, partly conscious, partly unconscious; the total is represented by the single individual, yet in such a way that it is only a single aspect which is determined as totality, and which now appears in a single individual, who is because of this, both more and less than an individual. By the side of this individual there stands another individual, who, likewise, totally represents another aspect of life’s content, such as the knight and the scholastic, the ecclesiastic and the layman. Either/Or Part I p. 86-87 Swenson