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Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
'What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?'
Either/Or is the earliest of the major works of Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most startlingly original thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, and the first which he wrote under a pseudonym, as he would for his greatest philosophical writings. Adopting the viewpoints of two distinct figures with radically different beliefs--the aesthetic young man of Part One, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section--Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is an exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical--both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.
This lightly abridged edition fully conveys the vigour and eloquence of the original. Alastair Hannay's introduction explains the philosophical background to the work and places it in the context of its times.
Either/Or is the earliest of the major works of Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most startlingly original thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, and the first which he wrote under a pseudonym, as he would for his greatest philosophical writings. Adopting the viewpoints of two distinct figures with radically different beliefs--the aesthetic young man of Part One, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section--Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is an exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical--both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.
This lightly abridged edition fully conveys the vigour and eloquence of the original. Alastair Hannay's introduction explains the philosophical background to the work and places it in the context of its times.
633 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 1843
About the author
Søren Kierkegaard
984 books5,658 followersSøren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Church of Denmark. Much of his work deals with religious themes such as faith in God, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. His early work was written under various pseudonyms who present their own distinctive viewpoints in a complex dialogue.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.
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August 27, 2024
Looks like Søren Kierkegaard was right.
One world. One destination. But two different strokes for two very different types of folks. The Eithers - and the Ors. Will they both get to their destination?
Let’s look at Zeno’s Paradox. I know, you’re gonna say that’s the oldest con in the book - extrapolating a purely mathematical formula onto practical reality to subvert it - but doesn’t layering both the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics onto reality do that too, and aren’t they both largely mutually exclusive?
Yet both are an accepted part of modern reality. Riddle me that, Zeno!
That old Greek Zeno’d probably have a good chuckle over that. For he was ONLY trying to say: Nothing is what it Seems. And isn’t that what our friend Kierkegaard is really trying to say here? All bets are off, friends!
Postmodernism has arrived.
So who gets the Real Trophy first - the Eithers or the Ors?
And is it worth it to know?
Well it’s an ethically polarized and a confusing world. We‘ve gotta get used to it.
And this book is an elusively allusive deconstruction of the inner dialectics of that world. Kierkegaard picked up THAT trick from Hegel.
But Hegel was trying to shore up the sanctity of the Modern State - to set ethics on a newer and firmer foundation than Kant’s pereginating prevarications could ever before do.
But now Kierkegaard is saying “cut it out, guys....
“Say to the sanctity of that old sacred cow, the State, begone! What we REALLY have to do is shore up the Sanctity of God...
“Whose Kingdom is not of this world - and Who thereby makes the mediocrely fitful sleep of the postmodern state ABSURD!”
Now there’s a clarion call for you!
I know, I know, the Nihilists and Dadaists and Poststructuralists have by and large ignored K’s POV. For they just wanted Freedom.
That carries an enormous price, friends, just so you know...
Kierkegaard, though, tried to tell us postmoderns that only the Truth will set us Free, and so he has been relegated to the dustbin of oblivion by the Sleep of Society.
EXCEPTING those unfortunates who are now Waking Up, and so need his tough talk more than ever before.
They are, he says, the Unhappiest Ones!
So they are Storing Up Wealth in Heaven.
Kierkegaard will take you on a marvellously self-combative long trip. Like Ryan Holiday he wants to kill our Ego.
Past the obfuscating, “quiet-voiced elders”, past the dreary limbo of his own doggedly deeply depressed self, past the Seducers of the World whom he dismembers and eviscerates right down to their marrow -
To a Life of New Hope. The Hope of PEACE.
A hope that is secured in the absolute cancellation of all our debts and the answer to all our postmodernist conundrums in the Divine Sac'rifice -
And puts us on a Free, Forever Road:
To “the Conclusion of all that is Inconclusible...”
The road that will lead us back to the Wide Awake Peace of “knowing the world (as it is) for the first time.”
This is an irreverent review of Reverence. I've Dumbed it Down to Death:
Yet, as you can see, you understood it in spite of my nonsense quite easily.
Welcome to Kierkegaard’s non Binary Aspie Paradox -
The Paradox of Breaking Even with God, and Your Suffering Self -
A Pre-Emptive Paradox, quite beyond neurotypical duality -
That may well be the Final One before Dawn.
One world. One destination. But two different strokes for two very different types of folks. The Eithers - and the Ors. Will they both get to their destination?
Let’s look at Zeno’s Paradox. I know, you’re gonna say that’s the oldest con in the book - extrapolating a purely mathematical formula onto practical reality to subvert it - but doesn’t layering both the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics onto reality do that too, and aren’t they both largely mutually exclusive?
Yet both are an accepted part of modern reality. Riddle me that, Zeno!
That old Greek Zeno’d probably have a good chuckle over that. For he was ONLY trying to say: Nothing is what it Seems. And isn’t that what our friend Kierkegaard is really trying to say here? All bets are off, friends!
Postmodernism has arrived.
So who gets the Real Trophy first - the Eithers or the Ors?
And is it worth it to know?
Well it’s an ethically polarized and a confusing world. We‘ve gotta get used to it.
And this book is an elusively allusive deconstruction of the inner dialectics of that world. Kierkegaard picked up THAT trick from Hegel.
But Hegel was trying to shore up the sanctity of the Modern State - to set ethics on a newer and firmer foundation than Kant’s pereginating prevarications could ever before do.
But now Kierkegaard is saying “cut it out, guys....
“Say to the sanctity of that old sacred cow, the State, begone! What we REALLY have to do is shore up the Sanctity of God...
“Whose Kingdom is not of this world - and Who thereby makes the mediocrely fitful sleep of the postmodern state ABSURD!”
Now there’s a clarion call for you!
I know, I know, the Nihilists and Dadaists and Poststructuralists have by and large ignored K’s POV. For they just wanted Freedom.
That carries an enormous price, friends, just so you know...
Kierkegaard, though, tried to tell us postmoderns that only the Truth will set us Free, and so he has been relegated to the dustbin of oblivion by the Sleep of Society.
EXCEPTING those unfortunates who are now Waking Up, and so need his tough talk more than ever before.
They are, he says, the Unhappiest Ones!
So they are Storing Up Wealth in Heaven.
Kierkegaard will take you on a marvellously self-combative long trip. Like Ryan Holiday he wants to kill our Ego.
Past the obfuscating, “quiet-voiced elders”, past the dreary limbo of his own doggedly deeply depressed self, past the Seducers of the World whom he dismembers and eviscerates right down to their marrow -
To a Life of New Hope. The Hope of PEACE.
A hope that is secured in the absolute cancellation of all our debts and the answer to all our postmodernist conundrums in the Divine Sac'rifice -
And puts us on a Free, Forever Road:
To “the Conclusion of all that is Inconclusible...”
The road that will lead us back to the Wide Awake Peace of “knowing the world (as it is) for the first time.”
This is an irreverent review of Reverence. I've Dumbed it Down to Death:
Yet, as you can see, you understood it in spite of my nonsense quite easily.
Welcome to Kierkegaard’s non Binary Aspie Paradox -
The Paradox of Breaking Even with God, and Your Suffering Self -
A Pre-Emptive Paradox, quite beyond neurotypical duality -
That may well be the Final One before Dawn.
June 30, 2016
Søren Kierkegaard was clever, arrogant, verbose, observant, cynical, ironic, prolific, religious, gifted. His writing is dense, polemical, lyrical, remarkable.
His magnum opus, Either-Or, is an exceptional work. I struggled my way through it, much as I imagine I would struggle to climb Mount Everest – through nebulous passages, up windy roads that sometimes narrowed, sometimes digressed into unexpected territory, always challenged my footing and my stamina. But on nearly every page there was a striking view to take in. I underlined sentence after sentence that made me stop, wonder, marvel; things that made me frustrated, impressed, enlightened, confused. It was tiring to read at times, perhaps even tiresome, because Kierkegaard would drone on and on, alighting on every possible angle to every topic. And yet it was these meanderings, these endless labyrinthine discussions that would produce golden nuggets of wisdom in the midst of beautiful, often archaic (in terms of today’s Danish) words.
The first part – Either – is an ostensible defense of the aesthetic perspective on life, consisting of a number of texts, different in genres and themes, which celebrate constant change and sensory experiences. In one of these texts, Kierkegaard discusses this aesthetic view of life (a narrower definition of the term compared to today’s understanding) through a lengthy appreciation of Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, written by Victor Emeritus, aesthete, one of Kierkegaard’s many aliases. This part also includes one of his more famous pieces, The Seducer’s Diary. In the second part - Or, he criticizes this a superficial take on life and argues for the ethical perspective: the nourishment of the soul and not just of the senses.
(Because of their cerebral compatibility, I wonder what Kierkegaard would have made of Oscar Wilde, and vice versa. When I say cerebral compatibility, I mean their extreme genius, their willingness to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time, their ability to reference other works of literature ad infinitum, their linguistic superiority and wordsmithery. Despite these similarities they lived lives that were at the opposite ends of the aesthetic/ethical spectrum, which, paradoxically, made them both embrace an either-or stance. Personally, I opt for a both-and one (an expression which we have in Danish)).
At 835 pages – a monstrous literary tour de force which cemented Kierkegaard’s status as one of the foremost thinkers of the age - this was a slow, slow read. I tried to read a minimum of ten pages at a time, but it turned out to be a maximum. I often went back to reread a sentence (which often began three lines above) to glean the exact meaning. Part of the problem is that the Danish language has evolved so much more since Kierkegaard’s days than the English language has, and many words have either disappeared from usage or have changed their usage to mean something different today. Also the inflections of verbs were different, and his punctuation – run-on clauses with only commas to separate them – would make me breathless. The Germanic capitalization of nouns was a detail in the bigger picture. I’ve been told he’s much easier to read in English, and so despite his (and my) original language being Danish, I might try him in English next time.
There was much I marvelled at, much I admired but also quite a bit I disagreed with. His view of women, for instance; he seems stuck in the 19th century (women are not born to work but are flighty, imaginative creatures, etc.), though it is sometimes difficult to know whether he speaks with his own voice or under a pseudonym and is thus being ironic or downright insincere to provoke a reaction (this is the case in the Seducer’s Diary, for instance, in which the narrator is neither aesthete nor ethically responsible but rather a cynic). Moreover, his reliance on God is a far cry from the rather a-religious Denmark of today and sometimes seemed at odds with his sharp, intellectual observations. Though he is often considered the father of existentialism, his particular branch was more religious than the later existentialists of the 20th century.
He ponders and discusses an abundance of life’s mysteries and challenges. Anxiety, for instance, is produced by our reflecting on things and as such, he claims, thus different from sorrow. It is always connected to time in the sense that you cannot be anxious about the present but only about what is past or what is in the future. Sorrow, on the other hand is bound to the present. This was something I pondered at length and which, like many of his other points and arguments, raised questions rather than gave any clear answers. Another point he made, which I immediately took to heart, is that we must not be (too) busy. If we’re too busy, we’re not taking our lives seriously. Throughout, he references Goethe’s Faust, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Shakespeare and many Greeks – in Greek; those quotes were Greek to me.
A selection of his more comprehensible quotes (which I’ve translated):
I say about my sorrow what the Englishman says about his home: my sorrow is my castle. Many people see having sorrows as one of life’s comforts.
Nobody returns from the dead, nobody has entered the world without crying; no one asks you when you want in, no one asks you when you want out.
An individual who hopes for eternal life is in a sense an unhappy individual insofar as he relinquishes the present, but is not in a stricter sense unhappy because he is present within this hope.
Can you long for what you already possess? Yes, when you imagine that in the next moment you may no longer possess it.
One of Denmark's three literary triumvirs, if you ask me, the other two being Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen. Recommended for the patient and philosophically-minded reader.
His magnum opus, Either-Or, is an exceptional work. I struggled my way through it, much as I imagine I would struggle to climb Mount Everest – through nebulous passages, up windy roads that sometimes narrowed, sometimes digressed into unexpected territory, always challenged my footing and my stamina. But on nearly every page there was a striking view to take in. I underlined sentence after sentence that made me stop, wonder, marvel; things that made me frustrated, impressed, enlightened, confused. It was tiring to read at times, perhaps even tiresome, because Kierkegaard would drone on and on, alighting on every possible angle to every topic. And yet it was these meanderings, these endless labyrinthine discussions that would produce golden nuggets of wisdom in the midst of beautiful, often archaic (in terms of today’s Danish) words.
The first part – Either – is an ostensible defense of the aesthetic perspective on life, consisting of a number of texts, different in genres and themes, which celebrate constant change and sensory experiences. In one of these texts, Kierkegaard discusses this aesthetic view of life (a narrower definition of the term compared to today’s understanding) through a lengthy appreciation of Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, written by Victor Emeritus, aesthete, one of Kierkegaard’s many aliases. This part also includes one of his more famous pieces, The Seducer’s Diary. In the second part - Or, he criticizes this a superficial take on life and argues for the ethical perspective: the nourishment of the soul and not just of the senses.
(Because of their cerebral compatibility, I wonder what Kierkegaard would have made of Oscar Wilde, and vice versa. When I say cerebral compatibility, I mean their extreme genius, their willingness to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time, their ability to reference other works of literature ad infinitum, their linguistic superiority and wordsmithery. Despite these similarities they lived lives that were at the opposite ends of the aesthetic/ethical spectrum, which, paradoxically, made them both embrace an either-or stance. Personally, I opt for a both-and one (an expression which we have in Danish)).
At 835 pages – a monstrous literary tour de force which cemented Kierkegaard’s status as one of the foremost thinkers of the age - this was a slow, slow read. I tried to read a minimum of ten pages at a time, but it turned out to be a maximum. I often went back to reread a sentence (which often began three lines above) to glean the exact meaning. Part of the problem is that the Danish language has evolved so much more since Kierkegaard’s days than the English language has, and many words have either disappeared from usage or have changed their usage to mean something different today. Also the inflections of verbs were different, and his punctuation – run-on clauses with only commas to separate them – would make me breathless. The Germanic capitalization of nouns was a detail in the bigger picture. I’ve been told he’s much easier to read in English, and so despite his (and my) original language being Danish, I might try him in English next time.
There was much I marvelled at, much I admired but also quite a bit I disagreed with. His view of women, for instance; he seems stuck in the 19th century (women are not born to work but are flighty, imaginative creatures, etc.), though it is sometimes difficult to know whether he speaks with his own voice or under a pseudonym and is thus being ironic or downright insincere to provoke a reaction (this is the case in the Seducer’s Diary, for instance, in which the narrator is neither aesthete nor ethically responsible but rather a cynic). Moreover, his reliance on God is a far cry from the rather a-religious Denmark of today and sometimes seemed at odds with his sharp, intellectual observations. Though he is often considered the father of existentialism, his particular branch was more religious than the later existentialists of the 20th century.
He ponders and discusses an abundance of life’s mysteries and challenges. Anxiety, for instance, is produced by our reflecting on things and as such, he claims, thus different from sorrow. It is always connected to time in the sense that you cannot be anxious about the present but only about what is past or what is in the future. Sorrow, on the other hand is bound to the present. This was something I pondered at length and which, like many of his other points and arguments, raised questions rather than gave any clear answers. Another point he made, which I immediately took to heart, is that we must not be (too) busy. If we’re too busy, we’re not taking our lives seriously. Throughout, he references Goethe’s Faust, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Shakespeare and many Greeks – in Greek; those quotes were Greek to me.
A selection of his more comprehensible quotes (which I’ve translated):
I say about my sorrow what the Englishman says about his home: my sorrow is my castle. Many people see having sorrows as one of life’s comforts.
Nobody returns from the dead, nobody has entered the world without crying; no one asks you when you want in, no one asks you when you want out.
An individual who hopes for eternal life is in a sense an unhappy individual insofar as he relinquishes the present, but is not in a stricter sense unhappy because he is present within this hope.
Can you long for what you already possess? Yes, when you imagine that in the next moment you may no longer possess it.
One of Denmark's three literary triumvirs, if you ask me, the other two being Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen. Recommended for the patient and philosophically-minded reader.
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April 25, 2017معرفی اجمالی کتاب "یا این یا آن"
اثر سورن کیرکگور
به مناسبت خبر ترجمه ى كتاب توسط "صالح نجفى"
سه سپهر
کیرکگور در نظریه ی انسان شناسی خود، تبیین می کند که زندگی انسانی، سه وادی مختلف، سه سپهر مختلف، سه جهان مختلف دارد و هر کس، الزاماً در یکی از این سه سپهر زندگی می کند: سپهر لذت جویی، سپهر اخلاقی، سپهر ایمانی.
کتاب «یا این یا آن» به بررسی دو مرحله از این سه سپهر (سپهر لذت جویی، و سپهر اخلاقی) می پردازد که فرد باید یکی را برگزیند و نمی تواند در هر دو زندگی کند. کیرکگور می گوید به رغم آن چه هگل اصرار دارد، همه چیز را نمی توان در یک نظام دیالکتیکیِ «هم این هم آن» با هم جمع کرد و به این ترتیب به کمال رساند؛ بلکه گاهی فرد باید بین دو راه یکی را انتخاب کند و دیگری را پس بزند، به همین دلیل این کتاب، «یا این، یا آن» نامیده شده است.
ساختار کتاب
کتاب از زبان سه شخصیت خیالی نوشته شده که هر یک نمایانگر یکی از شیوه های زندگی هستند و نظر خود راجع به «ازدواج» را بیان می کنند.
بخش نخست که توسط فردی بی نام نوشته شده، بیانگر «لذت جویی محض» است، جایی که فرد فقط دنبال لذت است و چیزی جز لذت نمی شناسد. این فرد ازدواج را نفی می کند و لذت افسار گسیخته ی دون ژوان مآبانه را بر می گزیند.
بخش دوم ( خاطرات یک اغواگر) توسط شخصیتی خیالی به نام «یوهانس اغواگر» نوشته شده و بیانگر شیوه ی «لذت جویی حسابگرانه» است، جایی که فرد بیش از آن که از شیئ خارجی لذت ببرد، از نقشه ریختن و حسابگری برای به دست آوردن آن شیئ لذت می برد. یوهانس هر بار تنها عاشق یک دختر می شود (بر عکس فرد بی نام بخش اول، که لذت جویی اش حد و مرزی نمی شناخت) و سعی می کند او را با طعمه ها و توطئه های خود به دام بیندازد، سپس به راحتی او را رها کرده، سراغ دیگری می رود.
بخش سوم به عنوان جوابیه ای بر دو بخش قبلی، توسط شخصیتی خیالی به نام «قاضی ویلهلم» نوشته شده که خود در عالم «اخلاقی» زندگی می کند. در این بخش قاضی ویلهلم بر اهمیت تعهد اخلاقی در زندگی (در این جا: پایبندی به ازدواج) تأکید می کند.
مؤخره ی کتاب، از زبان شخصیتی خیالی که کشیشی اهل «یوتلند» معرفی می شود نوشته شده، که ظاهراً اشاره ای است به سپهر سوم (سپهر ایمانی) که در زمان نوشتن این کتاب، کیرکگور هنوز تصویر روشنی از چیستی آن نداشت؛ اما بعدها این سپهر را هم در کتاب ترس و لرز خود به تفصیل شرح داد.
از کتاب
اگر ازدواج کنی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر ازدواج نکنی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه ازدواج کنی چه نکنی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
اگر به حماقت های این دنیا بخندی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر بر آن مویه کنی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه بخندی چه مویه کنی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
اگر خود را حلق آویز کنی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر خود را نکشی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه خود را بکشی چه نکشی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
این، خانم ها و آقایان، اساس فلسفه است.
اثر سورن کیرکگور
به مناسبت خبر ترجمه ى كتاب توسط "صالح نجفى"
سه سپهر
کیرکگور در نظریه ی انسان شناسی خود، تبیین می کند که زندگی انسانی، سه وادی مختلف، سه سپهر مختلف، سه جهان مختلف دارد و هر کس، الزاماً در یکی از این سه سپهر زندگی می کند: سپهر لذت جویی، سپهر اخلاقی، سپهر ایمانی.
کتاب «یا این یا آن» به بررسی دو مرحله از این سه سپهر (سپهر لذت جویی، و سپهر اخلاقی) می پردازد که فرد باید یکی را برگزیند و نمی تواند در هر دو زندگی کند. کیرکگور می گوید به رغم آن چه هگل اصرار دارد، همه چیز را نمی توان در یک نظام دیالکتیکیِ «هم این هم آن» با هم جمع کرد و به این ترتیب به کمال رساند؛ بلکه گاهی فرد باید بین دو راه یکی را انتخاب کند و دیگری را پس بزند، به همین دلیل این کتاب، «یا این، یا آن» نامیده شده است.
ساختار کتاب
کتاب از زبان سه شخصیت خیالی نوشته شده که هر یک نمایانگر یکی از شیوه های زندگی هستند و نظر خود راجع به «ازدواج» را بیان می کنند.
بخش نخست که توسط فردی بی نام نوشته شده، بیانگر «لذت جویی محض» است، جایی که فرد فقط دنبال لذت است و چیزی جز لذت نمی شناسد. این فرد ازدواج را نفی می کند و لذت افسار گسیخته ی دون ژوان مآبانه را بر می گزیند.
بخش دوم ( خاطرات یک اغواگر) توسط شخصیتی خیالی به نام «یوهانس اغواگر» نوشته شده و بیانگر شیوه ی «لذت جویی حسابگرانه» است، جایی که فرد بیش از آن که از شیئ خارجی لذت ببرد، از نقشه ریختن و حسابگری برای به دست آوردن آن شیئ لذت می برد. یوهانس هر بار تنها عاشق یک دختر می شود (بر عکس فرد بی نام بخش اول، که لذت جویی اش حد و مرزی نمی شناخت) و سعی می کند او را با طعمه ها و توطئه های خود به دام بیندازد، سپس به راحتی او را رها کرده، سراغ دیگری می رود.
بخش سوم به عنوان جوابیه ای بر دو بخش قبلی، توسط شخصیتی خیالی به نام «قاضی ویلهلم» نوشته شده که خود در عالم «اخلاقی» زندگی می کند. در این بخش قاضی ویلهلم بر اهمیت تعهد اخلاقی در زندگی (در این جا: پایبندی به ازدواج) تأکید می کند.
مؤخره ی کتاب، از زبان شخصیتی خیالی که کشیشی اهل «یوتلند» معرفی می شود نوشته شده، که ظاهراً اشاره ای است به سپهر سوم (سپهر ایمانی) که در زمان نوشتن این کتاب، کیرکگور هنوز تصویر روشنی از چیستی آن نداشت؛ اما بعدها این سپهر را هم در کتاب ترس و لرز خود به تفصیل شرح داد.
از کتاب
اگر ازدواج کنی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر ازدواج نکنی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه ازدواج کنی چه نکنی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
اگر به حماقت های این دنیا بخندی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر بر آن مویه کنی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه بخندی چه مویه کنی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
اگر خود را حلق آویز کنی پشیمان مى شوى، اگر خود را نکشی نیز پشیمان مى شوى؛
چه خود را بکشی چه نکشی، به یکسان پشیمان مى شوى و افسوس مى خورى.
این، خانم ها و آقایان، اساس فلسفه است.
February 26, 2024
Of course, a critic resembles a poet to a hair, except that he has no anguish in his heart, no music on his lips.
This is one of those rare unclassifiable books, whose genre was born the day it was published and which has since left no heirs. Kierkegaard gives us what appears, at first, to be a sort of literary experiment: the papers of two imaginary characters, found inside the escritoire by a third imaginary character. These two characters—referred to as ‘A’ and ‘B’—serve as the titular either/or; and their writings are a study in contrast. Specifically, Kierkegaard uses these two personages to juxtapose the aesthetic with the ethical modes of life, presumably asking the reader to choose between them. You might say it is a ‘choose your own adventure’ book of philosophy, except the adventure chosen turns out to be your life.
Part 1, by A, gives us the aesthetic man. We are presented with extracts from a journal, essays on Mozart’s Don Giovanni and ancient tragedy, a study of boredom, and the famous Seducer’s Diary: A’s record of his carefully planned seduction of a young girl. Part 2 is more focused, consisting of two long letters sent by B (who is supposed to be a middle-aged judge) to A, both exhorting the latter to turn towards a more ethical view of life. The styles of the two writers are suitably different: A is excitable, hyperbolic, and aphoristic, while B is more staid and focused. Nevertheless, it is never difficult to tell that Kierkegaard is the true author.
Neatly summarizing the difference in perspectives would be difficult, since Kierkegaard tends to be flexible with his own definitions. Perhaps the best way to capture the contrast is with the book’s central metaphor: seduction vs. marriage. In the first, A is concerned with attaining a maximum of pleasure. He is not a hedonist, and is not very interested in sex. Rather, he is interested in avoiding boredom by carefully shaping his developing relationship like a well-plotted novel, ensuring that each emotion is felt to the utmost. His primary concern, in other words, is to avoid the stale, the cliché, the repetitive. The judge, by contrast, sees marriage as far preferable to seduction, since it is through commitments like marriage that the inner self develops and becomes fully actualized. While the aesthete prefers to live in the moment, the ethical man notes that, even if every moment is novel, the self remains the same. Change requires commitment.
Interpreting the book is difficult. Are we being asked to make a choice in values? Such a choice could have no basis but chance or personal whim, since no pre-existing value could guide us between two incompatible value-systems. This, you might say, is the existentialist interpretation of the book: the primacy of choice over values. Yet other options are available. For example, despite Kierkegaard’s famous opposition to Hegel’s philosophy, this text is open to a Hegelian reading. Specifically, B’s perspective seems in many respects superior to A’s, since B demonstrates that he is able to understand A, while A presumably cannot understand B. Thus, you can perhaps regard B as the Hegelian antithesis to A’s thesis; and perhaps both of these can be united in a wider perspective, such as in Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith—a religious unity of inner feeling and outer obligation. There is also the unmistakable autobiographical element in this writing, since Kierkegaard had not long before broken off his own engagement.
This is just to scrape the surface of possibility. And this shows both the strength and weakness of Kierkegaard’s writing. On the one hand, this book is highly rich and suggestive, with brilliant passages buried amid piles of less compelling material. On the other hand, to call a book “rich” and “suggestive” is also to call it confused. Since no clear message emerges, and since there are no arguments to guide the way, the book can easily yield interpretations consonant with pre-conceived opinions. In other words, it is hard for me to imagine somebody being convinced to change their mind by reading this. But Kierkegaard can perhaps better be likened to a good art critic than to a systematic philosopher, for the value in his writing consists more in illuminating comments than in a final conclusion.
On the whole, however, I must say that I emerged with a distaste for Kierkegaard’s writing. At times he rises to commanding eloquence; but so often he seems to wallow in confusing and repetitive intricacies. More to the point, I find the general tenor of his writing to be anti-rationalist; and this is exemplified in the complete lack of argument in his writings. But nobody could deny that, all told, this is an extraordinary book and a worthy addition to the philosophical tradition.
November 21, 2014
Easily one of the best books I have read this year, as this year nears the end, I can say without a doubt that Kierkegaard was truly a genius. It is not without purpose that my mind immediately rushes to Nietzsche pithy aphorism on genius wherein he writes,
Kierkegaard knew that he was a genius, yet he also knew that he was misunderstood. This seems to me not to be a accidental product of the Danish culture's ability to exegete Kierkegaard properly, but rather, an intentional property postulated by Kierkegaard himself within his writings for the sole purpose of protecting "his heart, his sympathy" as Nietzsche said. Kierkegaard complains in his diaries that "People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood," yet it was not without purpose that Kierkegaard's Either/Or was cloaked in two pseudonyms fictionally "compiled" by another pseudonymous "editor."
Either/Or is split twain, as the first part is written by the young aesthetic called "A", and is a compilations of essays which reaches its pinnacle with The Seducer's Diary which is A's personal diary entries and letters back and forth to Coralina, a young maiden whom he seduces, engages, and thereupon breaks off. While reading through the "Either" part, I felt ecstatic, aroused, and excited, as the aesthetic appeal and philosophical dialectic that A engages in truly is seductive. The first portion is a bunch of aphorisms whereof all are highly quotable and attractive, and standard Kierkegaard. He then deals with the dialectic progression of the erotic understanding in music, and analyzes Mozart among others. Kierkegaard then deals with the Ancient's understanding of tragedy juxtaposed to the modern understanding of tragedy. In "Shadowgraphs," Kierkegaard deals with the aesthetic elements of theater and the psychological development of the aforesaid in the subject. My two favorite essays, however, are the next two which are entitled "The Unhappiest One" and "Crop Rotation." In the former Kierkegaard propounds his dialectical philosophy to show it is the unhappiest one of all that is the happiest, and in the latter he postulates a theory of life wherein he says that contrary to culture's opinion it is not idleness that is the root of all evil, but boredom. Both are written so fantastically that it hard not to agree with everything he says.
My understanding of Either could only have developed after reading Or, and it's understandable why Kierkegaard got so mad seeing Danish bookstores lined with the former whilst the latter went neglected compared to the former. They must be read in conjunction with one another, because all the ideas presented in both are not necessarily Kierkegaard's own ideas: this is a partial reason for the pseudonyms. Since this was Kierkegaard's first major work, written mostly in Germany in a short amount of time while he was attending the Schelling lectures, the breakup with Regine, his then fiancee, would have been extremely fresh. The aesthetic part of Either seems to be Kierkegaard's self-justification of the breakup, rationalizing that it was done in protection of Regine, and also, at the consummation of what Kierkegaard calls "first love." Marriage simply would have bridled them both, and would have hampered Kierkegaard's writing career also to be sure. Certainly, then, The Seducer's diary can be read in a but of an autobiographical flair, and indeed it writes like one, although often times Kierkegaard flips the subjects around.
What is more interesting is when I got to the Or portion. Written by a venerable Judge Wilhelm, they are two letters of correspondence to A, as in the 'novel' both the Judge and A are good friends, and A often comes over frequently to dine and spend time with the Judge and his wife. the Or section therefore serves as a rebuttal, and a personal one at that, as the judge shows the error of the young aesthetics's ways, claiming that he has a false view and foundation upon which he built is conceptions of love, duty, etc. on. The Judge systematically tries to refute the aesthetic in each theory postulated, and ultimately show the validity of marriage ethically and also aesthetically. Let us sum up the whole of the matter with one quotation from the Judge when he writes,
This is utterly brilliant, and to be sure, much of what Kierkegaard writes through the Judge are philosophical ideas that are further developed in his later works such as the movement from the aesthetic to the religious to the ethical in his Stages on Life's Way, and also the idea of choosing the self which lies in the infinite or absolute in The Sickness unto Death. The idea that Judge defends from the above, and indeed throughout his two essays to A, is that the aesthetic cannot be chosen as the absolute, because it is not a choice at all, but rather a defiance or privation away from the absolute, and hence because the self is lost, it follows that the self cannot choose the aesthetic since their is no self to do the choosing. Yet, when one postulates the ethical as the absolute, the self chooses absolutely because the choice is choosing yourself, which only can be found in the ethical, and because the ethical is the absolute, and the self is chosen, the aesthetic no thereby nullified as A would like to suppose, but is in fact affirmed, albeit in the relative sense of the subject. And so it follows that marriage, which is the ethical choice, affirms both the ethical and the aesthetic, the moral and the sensual.
What is so paradoxical about all this is that Kierkegaard is writing this only because he was able to since he broke off engagement with his previous fiancee, Regine Olson. Affirming the ethical validity of marriage, writing as the Judge, only after he denied it's validity practically by rejecting Regine. Incidentally enough, Kierkegaard would later regret not marrying, which makes his aphorism in the beginning of the book all the more poignant and chagrin.
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both" (p. 54).
"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than being misunderstood. In the latter case, perhaps his vanity suffers, but the former hurts his heart, his sympathy, which always says, "Alas, why do you want to have it as hard as I did?" Beyond Good and Evil, IX, Aphorism 290.
Kierkegaard knew that he was a genius, yet he also knew that he was misunderstood. This seems to me not to be a accidental product of the Danish culture's ability to exegete Kierkegaard properly, but rather, an intentional property postulated by Kierkegaard himself within his writings for the sole purpose of protecting "his heart, his sympathy" as Nietzsche said. Kierkegaard complains in his diaries that "People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood," yet it was not without purpose that Kierkegaard's Either/Or was cloaked in two pseudonyms fictionally "compiled" by another pseudonymous "editor."
Either/Or is split twain, as the first part is written by the young aesthetic called "A", and is a compilations of essays which reaches its pinnacle with The Seducer's Diary which is A's personal diary entries and letters back and forth to Coralina, a young maiden whom he seduces, engages, and thereupon breaks off. While reading through the "Either" part, I felt ecstatic, aroused, and excited, as the aesthetic appeal and philosophical dialectic that A engages in truly is seductive. The first portion is a bunch of aphorisms whereof all are highly quotable and attractive, and standard Kierkegaard. He then deals with the dialectic progression of the erotic understanding in music, and analyzes Mozart among others. Kierkegaard then deals with the Ancient's understanding of tragedy juxtaposed to the modern understanding of tragedy. In "Shadowgraphs," Kierkegaard deals with the aesthetic elements of theater and the psychological development of the aforesaid in the subject. My two favorite essays, however, are the next two which are entitled "The Unhappiest One" and "Crop Rotation." In the former Kierkegaard propounds his dialectical philosophy to show it is the unhappiest one of all that is the happiest, and in the latter he postulates a theory of life wherein he says that contrary to culture's opinion it is not idleness that is the root of all evil, but boredom. Both are written so fantastically that it hard not to agree with everything he says.
My understanding of Either could only have developed after reading Or, and it's understandable why Kierkegaard got so mad seeing Danish bookstores lined with the former whilst the latter went neglected compared to the former. They must be read in conjunction with one another, because all the ideas presented in both are not necessarily Kierkegaard's own ideas: this is a partial reason for the pseudonyms. Since this was Kierkegaard's first major work, written mostly in Germany in a short amount of time while he was attending the Schelling lectures, the breakup with Regine, his then fiancee, would have been extremely fresh. The aesthetic part of Either seems to be Kierkegaard's self-justification of the breakup, rationalizing that it was done in protection of Regine, and also, at the consummation of what Kierkegaard calls "first love." Marriage simply would have bridled them both, and would have hampered Kierkegaard's writing career also to be sure. Certainly, then, The Seducer's diary can be read in a but of an autobiographical flair, and indeed it writes like one, although often times Kierkegaard flips the subjects around.
What is more interesting is when I got to the Or portion. Written by a venerable Judge Wilhelm, they are two letters of correspondence to A, as in the 'novel' both the Judge and A are good friends, and A often comes over frequently to dine and spend time with the Judge and his wife. the Or section therefore serves as a rebuttal, and a personal one at that, as the judge shows the error of the young aesthetics's ways, claiming that he has a false view and foundation upon which he built is conceptions of love, duty, etc. on. The Judge systematically tries to refute the aesthetic in each theory postulated, and ultimately show the validity of marriage ethically and also aesthetically. Let us sum up the whole of the matter with one quotation from the Judge when he writes,
What stands out in my either/or is the ethical. So far, then, it is not a matter of the choice of some thing, not a matter of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of choosing. It is this, though, that is decisive and what I shall try to awaken you to...for only in choosing absolutely can one choose the ethical. Through the absolute choice, then, the ethical is posited, but from that it by no means follows that the aesthetic is excluded. In the ethical the personality is centered in itself; the aesthetic is thus excluded absolutely, or it is excluded as the absolute, but relatively it always stays behind. The personality, through choosing itself, chooses itself ethically and excludes the aesthetic absolutely; but since it is, after all, he himself the person chooses and through choosing himself does not become another nature but remains himself, the whole of the aesthetic returns in its relativity" (pp. 491, 491).
This is utterly brilliant, and to be sure, much of what Kierkegaard writes through the Judge are philosophical ideas that are further developed in his later works such as the movement from the aesthetic to the religious to the ethical in his Stages on Life's Way, and also the idea of choosing the self which lies in the infinite or absolute in The Sickness unto Death. The idea that Judge defends from the above, and indeed throughout his two essays to A, is that the aesthetic cannot be chosen as the absolute, because it is not a choice at all, but rather a defiance or privation away from the absolute, and hence because the self is lost, it follows that the self cannot choose the aesthetic since their is no self to do the choosing. Yet, when one postulates the ethical as the absolute, the self chooses absolutely because the choice is choosing yourself, which only can be found in the ethical, and because the ethical is the absolute, and the self is chosen, the aesthetic no thereby nullified as A would like to suppose, but is in fact affirmed, albeit in the relative sense of the subject. And so it follows that marriage, which is the ethical choice, affirms both the ethical and the aesthetic, the moral and the sensual.
What is so paradoxical about all this is that Kierkegaard is writing this only because he was able to since he broke off engagement with his previous fiancee, Regine Olson. Affirming the ethical validity of marriage, writing as the Judge, only after he denied it's validity practically by rejecting Regine. Incidentally enough, Kierkegaard would later regret not marrying, which makes his aphorism in the beginning of the book all the more poignant and chagrin.
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both" (p. 54).
September 9, 2007
This is one of those books that you read that covers a bunch of things you had been thinking about on your own, at which point you realize "oh: i'm not really that smart, am I?"
But as a general rule, I like anyone who agrees with me, and I like the way Kerigaodigjadkfaodfkadsdfnsldfkasdfnlaskdn (sp?) writes. 4 stars from me.
also a very very good album, but that's a different deal.
But as a general rule, I like anyone who agrees with me, and I like the way Kerigaodigjadkfaodfkadsdfnsldfkasdfnlaskdn (sp?) writes. 4 stars from me.
also a very very good album, but that's a different deal.
January 26, 2016
A book full of musings on many different elements of life and issues which are still very much relevant today, Either/Or is a wonderful book, not just as a piece of philosophy, but as pure literature. Soren Kierkegaard writes like a poet, which makes his philosophical writings so entertaining and enlightening to read.
A guide to a meaningful existence, Kierkegaard explores the aesthetic and ethical ideologies of life through two characters: A, the aesthetician and Judge Wilhelm, the ethicist. Part I is an exploration of aesthetic ideologies discussing music, poetry, boredom and which also includes Diary of a Seducer, a lovely little psychological novel within the book in which a calculated aesthetician seducts and then rejects the love of a woman.
Part II begins and rather savagely attacks aestheticism and discusses the positive aspects of the ethical ways while also exploring choices in life using the either/or categorization. Here, he takes his time, in two long letters, to explain how we should live our life, the choices we make and the extremities of certain life views.
Unconventional in its structure, Either/Or is full of aphorisms, extended essays, a novella, letters and even a religious sermon. With this structure, Kierkegaard explores human nature philosophically, psychologically, religiously and poetically in his first published work. It's an exceptionally complex book but, in the end, it's extremely rewarding.
A guide to a meaningful existence, Kierkegaard explores the aesthetic and ethical ideologies of life through two characters: A, the aesthetician and Judge Wilhelm, the ethicist. Part I is an exploration of aesthetic ideologies discussing music, poetry, boredom and which also includes Diary of a Seducer, a lovely little psychological novel within the book in which a calculated aesthetician seducts and then rejects the love of a woman.
Part II begins and rather savagely attacks aestheticism and discusses the positive aspects of the ethical ways while also exploring choices in life using the either/or categorization. Here, he takes his time, in two long letters, to explain how we should live our life, the choices we make and the extremities of certain life views.
Unconventional in its structure, Either/Or is full of aphorisms, extended essays, a novella, letters and even a religious sermon. With this structure, Kierkegaard explores human nature philosophically, psychologically, religiously and poetically in his first published work. It's an exceptionally complex book but, in the end, it's extremely rewarding.
July 22, 2021
I always hear people say that a book “changed their outlook on the world,” and i never really believed it. That is, until Either/or. Obviously those who know Anything about me know that my favorite person in the world is the late musician, Elliott Smith. I bought this book immediately after finding out that his most famous album (Either/or) was based off this work of literature—and Boy, was i Not disappointed. Words cannot describe the impact this had on me. Maybe because it’s one of the first real hardcore philosophy books i’ve read, but Wow. This exploration of the Love, Tragedy, God, Pain, Sorrow, Greek Legends, Human Nature (etc.) Is unlike anything IVE EVER READ. i never feel as if i will truly be “finished” with this book.
January 13, 2023
With Either/Or (1843), Danish theologian-turned-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has left us a real masterpiece: a work of genius, a work of art. Arguably it is his magnum opus, although some of his better read (and shorter) works like Fear & Trembling (1843) and Sickness unto Death (1849) can rival this status.
Either/Or is divided into two parts, written by two anonymous people A and B. B responds to A's esthetic view of life and does so in very personal terms, so A and B were acquaintances. B is a judge and a very earnest person, viewing an ethical life in general and marriage in particular as duties in life. Living within the ethical domain, one has to decide. It doesn't matter what one decides, as long as one takes responsibility for one's life and approaches life and all its intricacies from the view of being part of a whole (or wholes).
B's two long and reprimanding (or, as Kierkegaard would call it, edifying) letters contain criticisms of A's esthetic life. The esthetic approaches life from the Don Juan point of view: never choosing, never deciding, always on the move, always searching for new captivating moments - leaving suffering and emptiness in his wake. A fundamental characteristic of the esthetic life is its fragmentary nature: life never is whole nor is lived in relation to a whole. In other words: one never feels satisfied nor is ever part of something bigger than oneself (a marriage, a community, a church, a state, etc.)
A and B's outlooks on life are symbolized in the presentations of their documents. A's documents contain all sorts of (seemingly) unconnected essays, lectures, speeches and aphorisms, written in a very loose and unordered style on scrambled paper; B's documents contain two long, structured letters proceeding from comment to comment and written in a very strict style and on government paper which only civil servants use. B's documents further include a letter from a friend (who is a priest) detailing a sermon about man's need to continuously recognize his flaws and wrongs in the face of God.
Supposedly, this triad (A, B and the priest) represent Kierkegaard's three stages of life: the esthetic, the ethical and the religious. I find this a little bit too far-fetched. I'll admit that the pattern of Kierkegaard's later work is there, but I'm not sure if one can apply this idea to Either/Or - if only for the fact that the religious life isn't fleshed out in this book. To me it seems that the priest's letter is a confirmation of B's addresses to A (and this time from someone who is unfamiliar to A).
In all, Either/Or is a very sharp, entertaining and captivating exploration of the existential choices we all have to make in life. Kierkegaard's genius lies in the fact that he is a true artist, expressing these themes in all sorts of original ways - from an essay on the erotic stages in theatre plays to a diary of a yonug man seducing (or rather: manipulating) an innocent young girl just for the sake of his restless spirit; and from an address (on unhappiness, being the happiest state a human being can reach - and vice versa) to his fellow members of a secret society to the earnest and preachy letter on marriage being, in the end, not just a natural outcome of the ethical life but also being the highest point of the esthetic life.
I would have given Either/Or a five star rating were it not for the fact that some parts of this book are simply unreadable for a modern reader. In some of A's writings Kierkegaard takes a deep dive into contemporary theatre plays (among other things) in order to express his ideas on the esthetic life. The average modern day reader simply has no knowledge of all these things, which means a huge part of the message gets lost - or else one has to look up all the details and still miss out on a lot...
A second (minor) flaw is the length of the two letters by B. The first takes up more than 150 pages while the second nearly approaches 200 pages. The letters themselves contain no structure which means one has to work through endless streams of paragraphs. Apart from killing the fun this also means that a decent part of B's message gets lost along the way.
A third and final downside of Either/Or is its language. Kierkegaard uses contemporary philosophical jargon which basically means one has to plough through endless Hegelian sentences. Expect a LOT of dialectics and a whirlwind of Hegelian concepts. Although it has its charms and ties Kierkegaard's masterpiece to a particular historical epoch, it also has the unfortunate consequence that it makes the work unnecessarily inaccessible to modern day readers...
As a piece of art Either/Or is definitely among the greatest works in philosophy ever produced. Unfortunately there are a bit too many downsides to the book for me to give the highest rating. I will re-read this masterpiece in the future, and perhaps I will appreciate it even more that time.
Either/Or is divided into two parts, written by two anonymous people A and B. B responds to A's esthetic view of life and does so in very personal terms, so A and B were acquaintances. B is a judge and a very earnest person, viewing an ethical life in general and marriage in particular as duties in life. Living within the ethical domain, one has to decide. It doesn't matter what one decides, as long as one takes responsibility for one's life and approaches life and all its intricacies from the view of being part of a whole (or wholes).
B's two long and reprimanding (or, as Kierkegaard would call it, edifying) letters contain criticisms of A's esthetic life. The esthetic approaches life from the Don Juan point of view: never choosing, never deciding, always on the move, always searching for new captivating moments - leaving suffering and emptiness in his wake. A fundamental characteristic of the esthetic life is its fragmentary nature: life never is whole nor is lived in relation to a whole. In other words: one never feels satisfied nor is ever part of something bigger than oneself (a marriage, a community, a church, a state, etc.)
A and B's outlooks on life are symbolized in the presentations of their documents. A's documents contain all sorts of (seemingly) unconnected essays, lectures, speeches and aphorisms, written in a very loose and unordered style on scrambled paper; B's documents contain two long, structured letters proceeding from comment to comment and written in a very strict style and on government paper which only civil servants use. B's documents further include a letter from a friend (who is a priest) detailing a sermon about man's need to continuously recognize his flaws and wrongs in the face of God.
Supposedly, this triad (A, B and the priest) represent Kierkegaard's three stages of life: the esthetic, the ethical and the religious. I find this a little bit too far-fetched. I'll admit that the pattern of Kierkegaard's later work is there, but I'm not sure if one can apply this idea to Either/Or - if only for the fact that the religious life isn't fleshed out in this book. To me it seems that the priest's letter is a confirmation of B's addresses to A (and this time from someone who is unfamiliar to A).
In all, Either/Or is a very sharp, entertaining and captivating exploration of the existential choices we all have to make in life. Kierkegaard's genius lies in the fact that he is a true artist, expressing these themes in all sorts of original ways - from an essay on the erotic stages in theatre plays to a diary of a yonug man seducing (or rather: manipulating) an innocent young girl just for the sake of his restless spirit; and from an address (on unhappiness, being the happiest state a human being can reach - and vice versa) to his fellow members of a secret society to the earnest and preachy letter on marriage being, in the end, not just a natural outcome of the ethical life but also being the highest point of the esthetic life.
I would have given Either/Or a five star rating were it not for the fact that some parts of this book are simply unreadable for a modern reader. In some of A's writings Kierkegaard takes a deep dive into contemporary theatre plays (among other things) in order to express his ideas on the esthetic life. The average modern day reader simply has no knowledge of all these things, which means a huge part of the message gets lost - or else one has to look up all the details and still miss out on a lot...
A second (minor) flaw is the length of the two letters by B. The first takes up more than 150 pages while the second nearly approaches 200 pages. The letters themselves contain no structure which means one has to work through endless streams of paragraphs. Apart from killing the fun this also means that a decent part of B's message gets lost along the way.
A third and final downside of Either/Or is its language. Kierkegaard uses contemporary philosophical jargon which basically means one has to plough through endless Hegelian sentences. Expect a LOT of dialectics and a whirlwind of Hegelian concepts. Although it has its charms and ties Kierkegaard's masterpiece to a particular historical epoch, it also has the unfortunate consequence that it makes the work unnecessarily inaccessible to modern day readers...
As a piece of art Either/Or is definitely among the greatest works in philosophy ever produced. Unfortunately there are a bit too many downsides to the book for me to give the highest rating. I will re-read this masterpiece in the future, and perhaps I will appreciate it even more that time.
July 24, 2019
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it, weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will also regret that; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.
February 18, 2008
"Should I get married, should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and Faustus hood? Not take her to movies, but to cemetaries..."
- Gregory Corso
This is heartfelt, probing thinking which everyone goes through at one time or another. Whether its better to settle down and get married or to try and live zestfully as a single person.
Not to mention all the attendant indentity, Being, subjective/objective issues that accrue when you sit down and think about it.
There are- fictionally- two sets of letters here, a correspondence between youth and age. One from a dashing young cynic and the other from a boring, somewhat pompous old provincial.
the aesthetic versus the ethic, if you will.
Wonderful writing results, limitless insights. I'd quote them but I don't happen to have the book on hand. The erotic in music, the hour when all masks fall and we are revealed to be who we are to ourselves, how marriage is of the mind as well as the spirit and the body, how all men are bores.
What makes this go down easy is the fact that Kierkegaard can write beautifully. Not only does he argue and reason himself out (not like it's actually him, but it is...more on that later) but he uses little illustrations to make this metaphysic so much richer and more palatable.
Marriage, for one, is when you spend your entire day frowning over a book because there's an umlaut over one of the letters in a phrase that's not supposed to be there and suddenly your spouse comes in and you show it to them and they say 'O, look, it's just a speck of dust' and blows it away for good.
I'm not doing justice to this, but that's becuase I don't have enough personality!
TO wit: Kierkegaard had a bad love affair early in life and spent the next few decades of his life living off his father's inheritance and writing philosophy under different pen names. He even went so far as to use personalized grammer to create these characters, they did a linguistic analysis on it. Incredible.
But anyway he's literally speaking from different voices that manifest the ideas and conflicts he put himself through. The aesthete, the cynic, the ethicist, the tortured soul, the man of god.
He sat day after day writing away and adding voices to the symphony of his mind.
Amazing, right? No wonder he was a crazy genius.
This is one of his first books, and its worth every moment of time spent on it. You'll enjoy, I'm sure.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2017
I found the 'Either' part of the book somewhat tedious in itself. Music, art, seduction, Mozart and Don Giovanni is the greatest opera ever and so on. It took the 'Or' part of the book for me to really appreciate what was going on with the book as a whole. The universal can never be understood except through the particular (big theme with Kierkegaard and also Hegel but Hegel develops a coherent philosophy to deal with it).
Kierkegaard really once again gets to the heart of the issue of being human within his ramblings. There is something rotten in Denmark (and the world) and Kierkegaard has only his feelings to guide him and tries to layout what that is. At the heart of being human is a paradox that is best revealed by an irony which is always jealous of authenticity. David Foster Wallace's in his Infinite Jest grabs onto these concepts from Kierkegaard and ends up writing my second favorite fictional book which explores the same concepts in the guise of fiction. I'm not sure if others see that connection with "Infinite Jest" but as I was reading it I noticed Kierkegaard (and Reginia) were mentioned multiple times and I had connected the dots between the two within my own mind and what IJ was trying to get at.
Being can contrast with appearance, thought, ought or becoming. Kierkegaard focuses on the being/becoming dichotomy. The aesthetic is the being, and the ethical is the becoming in his formulation. There is an Aristotelian story that Kierkegaard is telling and he just assumes that his readers have read Aristotle. The beautiful, that which is its own teleology, is not the accidental but the essential and breaks the chain of necessity since it is only temporal and is not part of the mimetic, the they, our nature that is our culture.
It is not 'know thyself', it is 'choose thyself', Kierkegaard will state from his 'Or' alter ego. I only started understanding this book with the 'Or'. His 'Or' explained what the 'Either' was and what the 'Or' meant. The foundations for 'existentialism' definitely are within this book (as witnessed by his 'choose thyself' stance). The one thing we are always free to choose is our freedom according to 'Or' and the advice he gives to 'Either'.
There's a direct connection between what is going on in the country today with a president who after a hurricane has devastated a part of it says moronic things like "Puerto Rico has always been in debt, they're an island with problems, an island surrounded by a body of water, an ocean, a really big ocean (sic), Puerto Rico wants everything to be done for them" and with Kierkegaard's frustrations expressed in this book. Forty eight percent of Americans voted for the speaker of such moronic statements and they share Kierkegaard's extreme reaction against the lessons from the Enlightenment which are subtly presented within this book.
The connection lies here: The 'Or' needs 'the good' and 'the evil' to be from the infinite and unattainable. Kierkegaard will say that God is always right and we are always wrong, and God is not love and we must learn to reject the absolute completely before we can know God (most of this is gleamed from the text and other people might read it differently, but I think I could defend this if I were forced to based on this book alone. Also similarly Augustine, Miester Eckhart, and Pascal have a similar take on our relationship to God). The absolute truth is certain within the conservative mindset (and with Kierkegaard) and that eliminates the need for tolerance and therefore compassion (after all, why would any one need facts, data, logic, reason, analysis or the empirical if they already know truth with certainty from their feelings and sentiments, after all who really needs science when you already know "climate change is a Chinese Hoax", good God conservatives why can't you read "Scientific American" they have demonstrated the scientific truth of the absurdity of that statement with facts, data, logic, reason, analysis and empirical based models). (All of the Enlightenment can be distilled into the expression 'tolerance is good' and that is anathema to conservatives and Donald Trump).
I see Kierkegaard mostly as abhorrent. But, I still love to read him. He knows something that others don't know. Our contradictions make us human. Logic and Reason do not allow for contradictions, but existence leads to absurdities. Our despair (anxiety) is over 'nothing'. Trump (and his followers, 48% of the country) do not allow for the contradictions and believe their feelings and sentiments give certainty thus justifying their hate and intolerance for others. Kierkegaard wants certainty without contradictions but knows the closer he gets the further it gets from him. (This is what Infinite Jest gets at but takes over 1000 pages). Kierkegaard is aware of the contradictions, but doesn't accept them. Trump is not even aware of the contradictions.
This is Kierkegaard's first book. He's trying to keep it serious and is not yet mocking his reader or showing contempt for them. His 'Or' persona gets the last word and reveals the author as he wants to be, his 'Either' shows him how he is. I think he did such a good job with his 'Or' that I ignored the ramblings from his 'Either' because they ultimately become clear by the end of the book.
Kierkegaard really once again gets to the heart of the issue of being human within his ramblings. There is something rotten in Denmark (and the world) and Kierkegaard has only his feelings to guide him and tries to layout what that is. At the heart of being human is a paradox that is best revealed by an irony which is always jealous of authenticity. David Foster Wallace's in his Infinite Jest grabs onto these concepts from Kierkegaard and ends up writing my second favorite fictional book which explores the same concepts in the guise of fiction. I'm not sure if others see that connection with "Infinite Jest" but as I was reading it I noticed Kierkegaard (and Reginia) were mentioned multiple times and I had connected the dots between the two within my own mind and what IJ was trying to get at.
Being can contrast with appearance, thought, ought or becoming. Kierkegaard focuses on the being/becoming dichotomy. The aesthetic is the being, and the ethical is the becoming in his formulation. There is an Aristotelian story that Kierkegaard is telling and he just assumes that his readers have read Aristotle. The beautiful, that which is its own teleology, is not the accidental but the essential and breaks the chain of necessity since it is only temporal and is not part of the mimetic, the they, our nature that is our culture.
It is not 'know thyself', it is 'choose thyself', Kierkegaard will state from his 'Or' alter ego. I only started understanding this book with the 'Or'. His 'Or' explained what the 'Either' was and what the 'Or' meant. The foundations for 'existentialism' definitely are within this book (as witnessed by his 'choose thyself' stance). The one thing we are always free to choose is our freedom according to 'Or' and the advice he gives to 'Either'.
There's a direct connection between what is going on in the country today with a president who after a hurricane has devastated a part of it says moronic things like "Puerto Rico has always been in debt, they're an island with problems, an island surrounded by a body of water, an ocean, a really big ocean (sic), Puerto Rico wants everything to be done for them" and with Kierkegaard's frustrations expressed in this book. Forty eight percent of Americans voted for the speaker of such moronic statements and they share Kierkegaard's extreme reaction against the lessons from the Enlightenment which are subtly presented within this book.
The connection lies here: The 'Or' needs 'the good' and 'the evil' to be from the infinite and unattainable. Kierkegaard will say that God is always right and we are always wrong, and God is not love and we must learn to reject the absolute completely before we can know God (most of this is gleamed from the text and other people might read it differently, but I think I could defend this if I were forced to based on this book alone. Also similarly Augustine, Miester Eckhart, and Pascal have a similar take on our relationship to God). The absolute truth is certain within the conservative mindset (and with Kierkegaard) and that eliminates the need for tolerance and therefore compassion (after all, why would any one need facts, data, logic, reason, analysis or the empirical if they already know truth with certainty from their feelings and sentiments, after all who really needs science when you already know "climate change is a Chinese Hoax", good God conservatives why can't you read "Scientific American" they have demonstrated the scientific truth of the absurdity of that statement with facts, data, logic, reason, analysis and empirical based models). (All of the Enlightenment can be distilled into the expression 'tolerance is good' and that is anathema to conservatives and Donald Trump).
I see Kierkegaard mostly as abhorrent. But, I still love to read him. He knows something that others don't know. Our contradictions make us human. Logic and Reason do not allow for contradictions, but existence leads to absurdities. Our despair (anxiety) is over 'nothing'. Trump (and his followers, 48% of the country) do not allow for the contradictions and believe their feelings and sentiments give certainty thus justifying their hate and intolerance for others. Kierkegaard wants certainty without contradictions but knows the closer he gets the further it gets from him. (This is what Infinite Jest gets at but takes over 1000 pages). Kierkegaard is aware of the contradictions, but doesn't accept them. Trump is not even aware of the contradictions.
This is Kierkegaard's first book. He's trying to keep it serious and is not yet mocking his reader or showing contempt for them. His 'Or' persona gets the last word and reveals the author as he wants to be, his 'Either' shows him how he is. I think he did such a good job with his 'Or' that I ignored the ramblings from his 'Either' because they ultimately become clear by the end of the book.
Read
April 12, 2016From Part Two: (1) The Aesthetic validity of marriage
Marriage was constructed with highest in mind: lasting possession. To conquer, one needs pride; to possess, humility. To conquer one needs to be violent; to possess, to have patience. To conquer, greed; to possess, contentment... Pride lends itself superbly to representation, for what is essential in pride is not succession in time but intensity in the moment. Humility is hard to represent just because it is indeed successive. In the case of humility he really requires what poetry and art cannot provide, to see it in its constant process of becoming. Romantic love lends itself to representation in the moment; not so married love... I can represent a hero conquering kingdoms; but a cross-bearer who everyday takes up his cross can never be represented, because the point of it is that he does it everyday.
The development of the aesthetically beautiful and the perfecting of art depends on art's being able to free itself from space and to define itself in temporal terms. Music has time as its element but poetry is the most complete of all arts which knows best how to justice to the significance of time. But it has its limits, and cannot represent something whose very truth is temporal succession.
But if aesthetic remains incommensurable even with poetic representation, how can it be represented? Answer: by being lived. With this I have reached the highest in aesthetic...
Married love, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, and its eternity in time... Faithful, humble, patient, observant, persistent, willing... All these virtues have the property of being inward specifications of the individual. And they have a temporal qualification, for their truth consists not in applying once, but all the time. Married love does not come with an external mark... it is the incorruptible being of a quiet spirit.
Marriage was constructed with highest in mind: lasting possession. To conquer, one needs pride; to possess, humility. To conquer one needs to be violent; to possess, to have patience. To conquer, greed; to possess, contentment... Pride lends itself superbly to representation, for what is essential in pride is not succession in time but intensity in the moment. Humility is hard to represent just because it is indeed successive. In the case of humility he really requires what poetry and art cannot provide, to see it in its constant process of becoming. Romantic love lends itself to representation in the moment; not so married love... I can represent a hero conquering kingdoms; but a cross-bearer who everyday takes up his cross can never be represented, because the point of it is that he does it everyday.
The development of the aesthetically beautiful and the perfecting of art depends on art's being able to free itself from space and to define itself in temporal terms. Music has time as its element but poetry is the most complete of all arts which knows best how to justice to the significance of time. But it has its limits, and cannot represent something whose very truth is temporal succession.
But if aesthetic remains incommensurable even with poetic representation, how can it be represented? Answer: by being lived. With this I have reached the highest in aesthetic...
Married love, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, and its eternity in time... Faithful, humble, patient, observant, persistent, willing... All these virtues have the property of being inward specifications of the individual. And they have a temporal qualification, for their truth consists not in applying once, but all the time. Married love does not come with an external mark... it is the incorruptible being of a quiet spirit.
April 21, 2013
Either you have read this book, or you have not. If you have read it, you will not require a review, if you have not, non will suffice to describe its content.
A friend took me to visit Kierkegaard's grave at assistens kirkrgården in Copenhagen during a difficult time in my life. Ben Webster is also buried there.
A friend took me to visit Kierkegaard's grave at assistens kirkrgården in Copenhagen during a difficult time in my life. Ben Webster is also buried there.
Shelved as 'odustajem'
September 17, 2017Ne gledaj me zadugo,
Nismo jedno za drugo.
(opsa-sa)
Nismo jedno za drugo.
(opsa-sa)
June 24, 2023
In Kierkegaard's literary realm, a multitude of his own selves emerge—a profusion of characters embodying the stages of the philosopher's existence. Amidst these personages, one encounters a figure simply designated as 'A.' This individual, representative of the aesthetic realm, assumes the role of a writer. In a final twist, 'A' presents a tale titled 'The Seducer's Diary,' subtly implying his role as a mere editor, a cunning maneuver borrowed from seasoned short-story writers. On the opposing side of this philosophical coin stands the character we shall call 'B,' whose name is Vilhelm. Once a judge, now a writer, 'B' delves into the domain of the ethical. In his writings, he delves into the nature of the ethical individual, shedding light on a crucial distinction at the heart of their dichotomy. The pivotal axis on which their entire existence revolves lies in the transparency of the ethical individual, contrasting with the aesthete's penchant for living untethered, adrift in the subjective abyss. The ethical individual, living in accord with ethical principles, possesses self-knowledge—a profound awareness of their own being.
Kierkegaard ponders the notion that humanity perpetually clashes with the divine, that we are eternally at odds with God. However, far from being disheartening, this thought carries a profoundly enlightening quality. It reveals that God's love surpasses human love, for the kingdom of heaven is an eternal gift bestowed upon us freely and unconditionally, incapable of being earned through human efforts.
Kierkegaard ponders the notion that humanity perpetually clashes with the divine, that we are eternally at odds with God. However, far from being disheartening, this thought carries a profoundly enlightening quality. It reveals that God's love surpasses human love, for the kingdom of heaven is an eternal gift bestowed upon us freely and unconditionally, incapable of being earned through human efforts.
May 28, 2012
kierkegaard's either/or which i first read in the german translation (possibly a little closer to the danish original) is a first rate philosophical excursion that, much like many of the works of nietzsche, is also a first rate literary pleasure. it is only reluctantly that i call this book "non-fiction". if published today, e.g. in mcsweeney's, either/or, k.s first published book, would blow people away just the same and lead to a global existential outcry of youths. k. has always informed my writing. re-read it recently finding it just as relevant and important to me as it was thirty years ago when i first discovered it as a teenager alongside the writing of sartre, camus...unlike these frenchmen, kierkegaard has a northern lightness that appeals to my own mood.
February 11, 2021
DID NOT FINISH.
I got to page 142 and realised that in this piece K dawg is responding to multiple things that I don't have the foggiest notion about. I understand that he is a genius. And that he ran in circles of geniuses, maybe not socially but in thought. but, a time and a community that I have no idea of, persevering to the end would be lunacy for me. :D
I have been advised what philosophy I should start with and it should not be this :D
kisses to all who have understood it.
I got to page 142 and realised that in this piece K dawg is responding to multiple things that I don't have the foggiest notion about. I understand that he is a genius. And that he ran in circles of geniuses, maybe not socially but in thought. but, a time and a community that I have no idea of, persevering to the end would be lunacy for me. :D
I have been advised what philosophy I should start with and it should not be this :D
kisses to all who have understood it.
January 30, 2018
Three stars means I liked it - but given a directive HE could have made this dyad FAR less convoluted and still entertained a/us readers (even though it most certainly deserves 4or5). I don't have to understand it all to do so, right? There were lucid passages and then there were obscure lengthy digressions that took your head for a ride. There was of course the gap of time and context to hinder meaning as well. Anyone who can get so far down the rabbit hole of parsing the seduction of a young maiden with only an intension to bring her to the brink of ecstasy and then disappear (think "Dangerous Liaisons") is not worth my time for the ride along. It's fiction but then it's not, pseudonym aside. That's the 'Either' side. The 'Or' side read much cleaner and countered with an intention to collapse the duality into a universal whole. This was Kierkegaard's first foray into what would become his method of exploring topics of query, espousing his determinations whilst remaining on the proverbial sidelines through second-hand authoring. Brilliant and antithetical too. Christianity and existentialism parfait n' est ce pas? Once I get the whiff of an abstruse (ity) like this I change up my reading style and instead of slowing down for close inspection I accelerate not trying to understand so much as to accept the material and then let my subconscious go to work over time assembling a retrospect ah ha when something else triggers a comeback. Make sense? Read over yer head enough and eventually it will! Und so weiter....
January 23, 2014
Are passions, then, the Pagans of the soul? Reason alone baptized?
I guess the choice of this quote in the beginning of the book tells us a lot about the common thread in this book and the rest of his work.
So the book is divided into two parts and Victor Eremita is the editor who published the work.
The part I written by the young ironic aesthete “A” contains a lot of witty aphorisms, an essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a very interesting essay on tragedy in ancient and modern drama and an insightful chapter on how to deal with boredom. It finally ends with the seducer’s diary. (A attributes the authorship of the diary to another man Johannes.
The part II is a series of letters written to the young aesthete by an ethicist, an old judge named Wilhelm. In this part, judge Wilhelm presents us with the existential choice of either/or, also reminding us that we have a choice not to choose as “A” does. This part ends with a religious sermon(written by another author and not judge wilhelm).
It's hard to to praphrase this work but we can say that Either/Or at it's heart is concerned mainly with living, and the various ideas and insights you can get out of it are complex and layered.
And kierkegaard is quite poetic and this book(well, at least the first part) is a literary pleasure.
I guess the choice of this quote in the beginning of the book tells us a lot about the common thread in this book and the rest of his work.
So the book is divided into two parts and Victor Eremita is the editor who published the work.
The part I written by the young ironic aesthete “A” contains a lot of witty aphorisms, an essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a very interesting essay on tragedy in ancient and modern drama and an insightful chapter on how to deal with boredom. It finally ends with the seducer’s diary. (A attributes the authorship of the diary to another man Johannes.
The part II is a series of letters written to the young aesthete by an ethicist, an old judge named Wilhelm. In this part, judge Wilhelm presents us with the existential choice of either/or, also reminding us that we have a choice not to choose as “A” does. This part ends with a religious sermon(written by another author and not judge wilhelm).
It's hard to to praphrase this work but we can say that Either/Or at it's heart is concerned mainly with living, and the various ideas and insights you can get out of it are complex and layered.
And kierkegaard is quite poetic and this book(well, at least the first part) is a literary pleasure.
July 31, 2018
Trochę oszukiwałem czytając tę książkę. Są fragmenty, które są nie do przejścia. Ale są tez momenty pasjonujące. Rozdział pod nazwą „Dziennik uwodziciela” jest fantastyczny i przerażający. Tak cynicznego opisu manipulowania ludzkimi uczuciami chyba nie czytałem. Być może dlatego, że to nie tylko opis literacki ale także filozoficzny i naukowy. Głęboko psychologiczny.
To jest ogólnie książka o filozofii miłości. O wielu jej aspektach. O związkach, uwodzeniu, erotyce, rolach kobiety i mężczyzny i wielu innych sprawach ale właśnie w ujęciu psychologicznym i filozoficznym. I chociaż powstało to w 19-tym wieku, jest zdumiewająco aktualne. Myśle, że w Toruniu byliby zdziwieni, że chrześcijański prekursor egzystencjalizmu 150 lat temu miał nowocześniejsze spojrzenie na role kobiety i mężczyzny w związku niż współczesny kler.
Ogólnie to jest taka książka po której się wie, że się jest mądrzejszym nawet jeżeli nie zawsze się rozumie. Chodzi o piękny język, sposób formułowania myśli, obcowanie ze słowem, w którym jest klasa i dobro. Ale i tak uważam się za bohatera, że przebrnąłem.
Więc polecam tylko innym, takim jak ja, komandosom literatury 🤔🤦🏻♂️
To jest ogólnie książka o filozofii miłości. O wielu jej aspektach. O związkach, uwodzeniu, erotyce, rolach kobiety i mężczyzny i wielu innych sprawach ale właśnie w ujęciu psychologicznym i filozoficznym. I chociaż powstało to w 19-tym wieku, jest zdumiewająco aktualne. Myśle, że w Toruniu byliby zdziwieni, że chrześcijański prekursor egzystencjalizmu 150 lat temu miał nowocześniejsze spojrzenie na role kobiety i mężczyzny w związku niż współczesny kler.
Ogólnie to jest taka książka po której się wie, że się jest mądrzejszym nawet jeżeli nie zawsze się rozumie. Chodzi o piękny język, sposób formułowania myśli, obcowanie ze słowem, w którym jest klasa i dobro. Ale i tak uważam się za bohatera, że przebrnąłem.
Więc polecam tylko innym, takim jak ja, komandosom literatury 🤔🤦🏻♂️
June 18, 2016
"Yes, I assure you that if my own life, through no fault of my own, were so fraught with sorrows and sufferings that I could call myself the greatest tragic hero, revel in my pain, and appal the world by calling attention to it, my choice is made; I divest myself of the hero's apparel and of tragedy's pathos, I am not the afflicted one who can be proud of his suffering, I am the humble one who is aware of his sin. I have only one expression for what I suffer-guilt; one expression for my pain-repentance; one hope before my eyes-forgiveness; and if I find this difficult… I have but one prayer, I will throw myself to the ground and implore the eternal power that governs the world for one grace early and late, that I be allowed to repent. For I know only one sorrow which can bring me to despair and plunge everything down into it-the sorrow that repentance was a delusion, a delusion not in respect of the forgiveness it seeks, but in the accountability it presupposes."
This passage is one of the most powerful and beautiful I have ever read.
This passage is one of the most powerful and beautiful I have ever read.
April 29, 2010
This was a slow read. Not because it isn't interesting but because it demands every available brain cell be focused. His discussions of the aesthetic and then the ethical life are presented by means of letters, and a diary, written by different characters created by Kierkegaard. This is a devise to show the various views from the inside.
Having read Fear and Trembling before this definitely helped me sort out some of what he was saying. An understanding his views regarding despair, resignation, and freedom was helpful.
"The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" attempts to reconcile the aesthetic and ethical by claiming that the nature of marriage makes it more aesthetically pleasing than a fling, and it is an ethical model as well. However, he does show that there are limitations inherent in this choice as well.
The writing is engaging, at times amusing, even if demanding.
I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm done.
Having read Fear and Trembling before this definitely helped me sort out some of what he was saying. An understanding his views regarding despair, resignation, and freedom was helpful.
"The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" attempts to reconcile the aesthetic and ethical by claiming that the nature of marriage makes it more aesthetically pleasing than a fling, and it is an ethical model as well. However, he does show that there are limitations inherent in this choice as well.
The writing is engaging, at times amusing, even if demanding.
I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm done.
December 1, 2019
I always feel obliged to point out that the number of stars I give a book, or in fact my comments in the "review box" are less an evaluation of the book itself than they are of my ability to understand and appreciate it. In this book Kierkegaard describes his views on the differences between leading an aesthetic life and an ethical life and earns the distinction of being one of the first existentialists. His views about the respective roles of men and women in society are, however, very much a reflection of early 19th century thought and, for all of his uncontested influence on existentialist philosophy, would not make him popular today.
October 4, 2007
Even if you are not interested in philosophy, this book is great to read just for its literary style. Kierkegaard speaks through a pseudonymous editor, who has compiled the diary of an aesthete who is also a seducer of young girls. Warning the aesthete is a judge who pleads with him to choose an ethical life over his aesthetic gallavanting lifestyle.
Kierkegaard is not only a great philosopher, but also a great writer. This is his first work and also the best introduction to his later philosophy. Choose the aesthetic life or the ethic life, whichever you choose you'll be disappointed.
Kierkegaard is not only a great philosopher, but also a great writer. This is his first work and also the best introduction to his later philosophy. Choose the aesthetic life or the ethic life, whichever you choose you'll be disappointed.
August 30, 2016
Alastair Hannay writes that the "motivation" for Either/Or was "probably a combination of two things:" 1. breaking off with Regine Olsen and 2. his confrontation with Schelling's philosophy. I'm fascinated by the whole breakup story. I've long tried to figure out why he did it. I think it was Francis Bacon who said something like "He who has a wife and children has given hostages to fortune." Or maybe it was Kevin Bacon. In any case, I think Soren made the choice to write and he did not want anything to stand in his way. Even his love for this young woman.
As a poet myself, I was fascinated by the story in the first paragraph of Diapsalmata. He compares poets to the "unfortunates" who are being "slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris's bull." To the tyrant, "they sounded like sweet music." So with the poet. He needs to suffer to write. The words may be beautiful, but they are a product of suffering.
I love the lines where Kierkegaard repeats "I can't be bothered" about opposite things. So he can't be bothered to ride and he can't be bothered to walk. He makes the point elsewhere as well that no matter what we do we will regret it. So there is no solution here on earth except suffering. He calls sorrow his life's "castle." The way others refer to their homes.
I also love his famous image about the tile falling from a roof and hitting someone on the head. What's the point in making plans when you could walk out the door and get hit on the head by a falling tile and die.
I think these lines are the beginning of existentialism:
"No one comes back from the dead, no one has entered the world without crying; no one is asked when he wishes to enter life, nor when he wishes to leave."
Kierkegaard speaks of winning an essay contest at age 15 about the proof of the existence of the soul. Now at age 25, he cannot think of a single proof of the soul. This will all lead to the leap of faith. Forget proof, just believe.
He makes his main point about tragedy in a bit of a contradiction: "there is an essential difference between ancient and modern tragedy" BUT "the concept of the tragic remains essentially unchanged." His first point is that the aesthetics of Aristotle still apply. And I have to agree with the genius of Aristotle. The difference with the modern concept of tragedy is that now the "hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds." In the past it was more the sins of the father in the case of Antigone, or perhaps some excessive hubris as in the case of Oedipus.
We are presented with three Shadowgraphs: Marie Beaumarchais from Goethe's Clavigo, Donna Elvira from Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Margrete from Goethe's Faust. All of them women who were mistreated by men. I can't help but go back again to Kierkegaard's personal life with Regine Olsen. More and more I believe he thought he was his own Don Juan. There may have been many reasons why he dumped her, such as the desire to focus on writing, but I think the whole Don Giovanni metaphor influenced him also.
Kierkegaard's description of "The Unhappiest One":
“He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he is already old. In one sense of the word he cannot die, for he is already old. In one sense of the word he cannot die, for he has not really lived; in another sense he cannot live, for he is already died. He cannot love, for love is in the present, and he has no present, no future, and no past; and yet he has a sympathetic nature, and he hates the world only because he loves it. He has no passion, not because he is destitute of it, but because simultaneously he has the opposite passion. He has no time for anything, not because his time is take up with something else, but because he has no time at all. He is impotent, not because he has no energy, but because his own energy makes him impotent.”
He starts with the idea in Crop Rotation that "all men are boring." He should know.
"Boredom is the root of all evil." When kids are bored, they cause trouble and misbehave. Hire nursemaids that know how to entertain children. I have to give Kierkegaard credit for understanding youngsters.
Boredom can be traced back to "the very beginning of the world." Bored gods created humans. Bored Adam got Eve. Bored Adam and Eve conceived children. Bored children increased population. "The peoples were bored en masse so they built the Tower of Babel. Now bored people create a "constitutional assembly."
Limit yourself and become resourceful. A prisoner in solitary confinement becomes amused by a spider.
For married couples to promise "eternal love" is absurd. They should set a date they could "perhaps keep to."
When a man tires of his wife and throws her out, he is thought of as contemptible. Kierkegaard does not understand this.
Having a wife limits your freedom and "travel boots." A wife and children eliminates them.
Have the courage to break off a marriage he says.
In The Seducer's Diary, he speaks about seduction as if it were an art form. He considers engagement as "a purely invention and reflects no credit at all on its inventor." And it has nothing to do with love. Engagement loses its sense of eroticism. The seducer carries on his seduction until just the right moment. It must not be too soon. And he continues to promote the idea of female virginity which has been a bane on women for so long.
"Once resistance is gone, love is only weakness and habit." . . . "If I were a god, I would do what Neptune did for a nymph: change her into a man."
Kierkegaard believes that if there is a future, there is an either/or choice. I have gradually lost that belief in my own life. In any moment, I feel the past weighing down on me like a freight train. It feels that I may have a choice about tomorrow, but when it arrives it is no different than this moment.
As a poet myself, I was fascinated by the story in the first paragraph of Diapsalmata. He compares poets to the "unfortunates" who are being "slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris's bull." To the tyrant, "they sounded like sweet music." So with the poet. He needs to suffer to write. The words may be beautiful, but they are a product of suffering.
I love the lines where Kierkegaard repeats "I can't be bothered" about opposite things. So he can't be bothered to ride and he can't be bothered to walk. He makes the point elsewhere as well that no matter what we do we will regret it. So there is no solution here on earth except suffering. He calls sorrow his life's "castle." The way others refer to their homes.
I also love his famous image about the tile falling from a roof and hitting someone on the head. What's the point in making plans when you could walk out the door and get hit on the head by a falling tile and die.
I think these lines are the beginning of existentialism:
"No one comes back from the dead, no one has entered the world without crying; no one is asked when he wishes to enter life, nor when he wishes to leave."
Kierkegaard speaks of winning an essay contest at age 15 about the proof of the existence of the soul. Now at age 25, he cannot think of a single proof of the soul. This will all lead to the leap of faith. Forget proof, just believe.
He makes his main point about tragedy in a bit of a contradiction: "there is an essential difference between ancient and modern tragedy" BUT "the concept of the tragic remains essentially unchanged." His first point is that the aesthetics of Aristotle still apply. And I have to agree with the genius of Aristotle. The difference with the modern concept of tragedy is that now the "hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds." In the past it was more the sins of the father in the case of Antigone, or perhaps some excessive hubris as in the case of Oedipus.
We are presented with three Shadowgraphs: Marie Beaumarchais from Goethe's Clavigo, Donna Elvira from Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Margrete from Goethe's Faust. All of them women who were mistreated by men. I can't help but go back again to Kierkegaard's personal life with Regine Olsen. More and more I believe he thought he was his own Don Juan. There may have been many reasons why he dumped her, such as the desire to focus on writing, but I think the whole Don Giovanni metaphor influenced him also.
Kierkegaard's description of "The Unhappiest One":
“He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he is already old. In one sense of the word he cannot die, for he is already old. In one sense of the word he cannot die, for he has not really lived; in another sense he cannot live, for he is already died. He cannot love, for love is in the present, and he has no present, no future, and no past; and yet he has a sympathetic nature, and he hates the world only because he loves it. He has no passion, not because he is destitute of it, but because simultaneously he has the opposite passion. He has no time for anything, not because his time is take up with something else, but because he has no time at all. He is impotent, not because he has no energy, but because his own energy makes him impotent.”
He starts with the idea in Crop Rotation that "all men are boring." He should know.
"Boredom is the root of all evil." When kids are bored, they cause trouble and misbehave. Hire nursemaids that know how to entertain children. I have to give Kierkegaard credit for understanding youngsters.
Boredom can be traced back to "the very beginning of the world." Bored gods created humans. Bored Adam got Eve. Bored Adam and Eve conceived children. Bored children increased population. "The peoples were bored en masse so they built the Tower of Babel. Now bored people create a "constitutional assembly."
Limit yourself and become resourceful. A prisoner in solitary confinement becomes amused by a spider.
For married couples to promise "eternal love" is absurd. They should set a date they could "perhaps keep to."
When a man tires of his wife and throws her out, he is thought of as contemptible. Kierkegaard does not understand this.
Having a wife limits your freedom and "travel boots." A wife and children eliminates them.
Have the courage to break off a marriage he says.
In The Seducer's Diary, he speaks about seduction as if it were an art form. He considers engagement as "a purely invention and reflects no credit at all on its inventor." And it has nothing to do with love. Engagement loses its sense of eroticism. The seducer carries on his seduction until just the right moment. It must not be too soon. And he continues to promote the idea of female virginity which has been a bane on women for so long.
"Once resistance is gone, love is only weakness and habit." . . . "If I were a god, I would do what Neptune did for a nymph: change her into a man."
Kierkegaard believes that if there is a future, there is an either/or choice. I have gradually lost that belief in my own life. In any moment, I feel the past weighing down on me like a freight train. It feels that I may have a choice about tomorrow, but when it arrives it is no different than this moment.
June 13, 2015
Volumes I & II, unabridged. Disappointing. 2.5 stars. Too long, too often long and boring, and too philosophically sloppy. In a word, sophomoric. Unfortunately the primary appeal in the blurring of the line between novel and philosophy does not, in this iteration, fulfill its coded promise and rise above the sum of its parts. Indeed it fails to satisfy as either or – no pun intended.
It’s usually a bad sign when a translator deems it necessary to warn: “[passages] which not only are badly expressed but often are examples, and tedious examples, of argument for argument’s sake.”
The pseudonymous device (enter: Victor Eremita; A; Johannes; Judge William aka B; and a pastor in Jutland) seems to serve Kierkegaard more than his reader. Criticism for weak positions can seemingly always be transferred to one of these thinly limned characters. It seems Kierkegaard himself knew at some level the work’s shortcomings, often making the philosophical opponents of A and B pause their arguments to shovel exaltations of genius on the other, as if in compensation for the genius that Kierkegaard fails to evoke in them.
Yes we are forced to choose. And yes through our choices we define who we are. This is why existentialism is interesting and worthy. But the frame of the argument here is that the choice is only a choice between two–the aesthetic and the ethical. Perhaps the book was never meant to represent the pure forms of each side of this argument. But the positions here are so dogmatically particular in their biases (A is a kind of narcissist and B a kind of Christian) that the dialogue amounts to little more than two, more intellectual than wise egos inflating their respective, narrow conceptions of reality under the mutually agreed upon premise that one of them is right and the common inner certainty that that one is their own - of course. It’s like two quasi intelligent men windily arguing over the superiority between green and purple. It’s a stupid argument even if life wasn’t short.
A and B may very well deserve each other, but I would hesitate to say that anyone deserves to suffer through 800+ pages of their arbitrary polemics as written by a young Kierkegaard. Certainly in the hands of a master novelist this could make for a worthy satire. How much of our world has gone wrong because of such a combination of faith and dualism?
The book does have its moments; parts stand rather competently on their own. The Diary of Seducer is a respectable predecessor to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I purloined a page and half of quotes – although most are better served taken out of context. After approximately 600 pages, Equilibrium kicks in with some philosophical punch. But beyond 100 pages or so it resumes the standard trifling dogma. And if that wasn’t enough, B then sees fit to add his thoughts on women with statements like, “I hate all talk about the emancipation of women.”
When toward the end B says, “What I wanted to do was to show how the ethical, in regions which border on the aesthetical, is so far from depriving life of its beauty that it bestows beauty upon it.” it only highlights the books failure. So unless the ultimate meaning of the work is Either don’t read it Or be bored to tears by it - as if an elaborate and completely self aware joke - then Kierkegaard missed with this one. My advice is to skip ahead to one of his shorter, more mature works.
It’s usually a bad sign when a translator deems it necessary to warn: “[passages] which not only are badly expressed but often are examples, and tedious examples, of argument for argument’s sake.”
The pseudonymous device (enter: Victor Eremita; A; Johannes; Judge William aka B; and a pastor in Jutland) seems to serve Kierkegaard more than his reader. Criticism for weak positions can seemingly always be transferred to one of these thinly limned characters. It seems Kierkegaard himself knew at some level the work’s shortcomings, often making the philosophical opponents of A and B pause their arguments to shovel exaltations of genius on the other, as if in compensation for the genius that Kierkegaard fails to evoke in them.
Yes we are forced to choose. And yes through our choices we define who we are. This is why existentialism is interesting and worthy. But the frame of the argument here is that the choice is only a choice between two–the aesthetic and the ethical. Perhaps the book was never meant to represent the pure forms of each side of this argument. But the positions here are so dogmatically particular in their biases (A is a kind of narcissist and B a kind of Christian) that the dialogue amounts to little more than two, more intellectual than wise egos inflating their respective, narrow conceptions of reality under the mutually agreed upon premise that one of them is right and the common inner certainty that that one is their own - of course. It’s like two quasi intelligent men windily arguing over the superiority between green and purple. It’s a stupid argument even if life wasn’t short.
A and B may very well deserve each other, but I would hesitate to say that anyone deserves to suffer through 800+ pages of their arbitrary polemics as written by a young Kierkegaard. Certainly in the hands of a master novelist this could make for a worthy satire. How much of our world has gone wrong because of such a combination of faith and dualism?
The book does have its moments; parts stand rather competently on their own. The Diary of Seducer is a respectable predecessor to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I purloined a page and half of quotes – although most are better served taken out of context. After approximately 600 pages, Equilibrium kicks in with some philosophical punch. But beyond 100 pages or so it resumes the standard trifling dogma. And if that wasn’t enough, B then sees fit to add his thoughts on women with statements like, “I hate all talk about the emancipation of women.”
When toward the end B says, “What I wanted to do was to show how the ethical, in regions which border on the aesthetical, is so far from depriving life of its beauty that it bestows beauty upon it.” it only highlights the books failure. So unless the ultimate meaning of the work is Either don’t read it Or be bored to tears by it - as if an elaborate and completely self aware joke - then Kierkegaard missed with this one. My advice is to skip ahead to one of his shorter, more mature works.
March 2, 2022
I have circled around Kierkegaard for a while, and although I know of his beliefs through secondary sources I have read little directly (apart from the short Fear and Trembling). This is a huge booked - the version I read has over 600 pages and is an abridged version. It is not what I expected, but that's no bad thing in a book. It's also hard to position, do you think of this as a novel, a philosophy text or something else?
Overall, I'd say that this is an accomplished translation as I neve felt the awkwardness that some translations feel. Having got passed that possible problem of the Danish language then, what of the book itself? Well it is an easier read than I was expecting - now that's not saying much as I was expecting really hard reading. It is pretty dense, but given the right focus and pace it is not tricky reading.
I'm not going to try and explain the contents beyond the famous parts A and B with two different voices explaining their philosophy of life - through very specific areas. It varies between being long winded and frankly, rather dull, and then brilliantly insightful. There are times when I read page after page and was thinking to myself "come on Kierkegaard move on, I've got the point", and then there were single sentences or paragraphs which shook me with their insight and brilliance. The former was especially true in the long section on Mozart and Don Giovanni. The latter was scattered through the book.
Not for the faint hearted, but more accessible than you might imagine. If you fancy something that is probably like nothing else, maybe give it a try? But perhaps read a little first to see if you are going to get into it!
Overall, I'd say that this is an accomplished translation as I neve felt the awkwardness that some translations feel. Having got passed that possible problem of the Danish language then, what of the book itself? Well it is an easier read than I was expecting - now that's not saying much as I was expecting really hard reading. It is pretty dense, but given the right focus and pace it is not tricky reading.
I'm not going to try and explain the contents beyond the famous parts A and B with two different voices explaining their philosophy of life - through very specific areas. It varies between being long winded and frankly, rather dull, and then brilliantly insightful. There are times when I read page after page and was thinking to myself "come on Kierkegaard move on, I've got the point", and then there were single sentences or paragraphs which shook me with their insight and brilliance. The former was especially true in the long section on Mozart and Don Giovanni. The latter was scattered through the book.
Not for the faint hearted, but more accessible than you might imagine. If you fancy something that is probably like nothing else, maybe give it a try? But perhaps read a little first to see if you are going to get into it!
January 20, 2012
Enten you Love this / Eller you don't. It had a big impact on my life for sure...
November 8, 2014
A: take many lovers! maximise enjoyment!
B: marry! love your wife with all your soule!
C: Most famous cat on the Internet: Maru - compilation (329.9 Mb)
B: marry! love your wife with all your soule!
C: Most famous cat on the Internet: Maru - compilation (329.9 Mb)
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