Either/Or – By Soren Kierkegaard – Existentialist Book Review and Summary
Either/or is a highly influential book that contrasts two different ways of living life: aesthetics and ethics. The aesthetic life is one of passion, desire and whim, while ethics leans more towards discipline and order. It was written by Soren Kierkegaard, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 19th century. His work was originally ignored and obscure, not least because it was rejected by the Danish Church, however it became increasingly popular around the turn of the century and has significantly influenced a number of leading philosophers since. It is cited as a foundational work in the discipline of existentialism, which is a broad category of work that emphasizes the concepts of free will and subjectivity; it is basically a treatise that addresses the question: ‘How should we live our lives?’
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when sighs and moans pass through them they sound like beautiful music.”
The first half of the book are the writings of ‘A’, a man who lives his life in the aesthetic phase. He is a very impulsive, capricious and fanciful person who laments the dull and mundane nature of life; and his response to this is to lead a spontaneous and highly inconsistent life to combat the unhappy effects of boredom. The main goal of this man is to pursue sensory pleasures for himself, and therefore his actions are very selfish, disregarding the concerns and interests of those around him. The structure of this section is written to reflect the nature of the author’s mind: it is highly poetic and idyllic, or, for lack of a better word, aesthetic. This section contains the famous ‘Seducer’s Diary’, which tells the story of a man who plays with a young girl’s love life just for fun. The second section is written by a ‘Wilhelm Judge’ and contains Kierkegaard’s idea of an ethical phase of life. This section makes the claim that a consistent and stable existence is far more happiness-inducing, as the polarized emotional existence of the aesthetic phase is too uncertain and will eventually lead to emotional ruin. Contrast the benefits between the life of a married man and that of a seducer: the married man always has something to look forward to, while the seducer always looks back, remembering past conquests and constantly searching for new ones.
How absurd are men! They never use the freedoms they have, they demand the ones they don’t have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of expression.
However, what we see in the end is that the two phases of life are inextricably linked and that it is impossible to live your life according to only one phase. This is evident from the very fact that Judge Wilhelm advocates the ethical life, since she is more inducing of aesthetic pleasures, and the very fact that A is trying to instruct the reader shows that she has ethical concerns. What is posited as a separate sphere of life is the religious phase of life, which is dealt with in much more detail in Kierkegaard’s other works, but is still substantially addressed here. Either or it is an extremely deep read, the kind of book where you have to read and reread sections to understand their full meaning.
I feel like I’m a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says: That piece can’t be moved.