SØREN AABYE KIERKEGAARD was born in Copenhagen in 1813, the youngest of seven children. His mother, his sisters and two of his brothers all died before he reached his twenty-first birthday. Kierkegaard’s childhood was an isolated and unhappy one, clouded by the religious fervour of his father. He was educated at the School of Civic Virtue and went on to enter the university, where he read theology but also studied the liberal arts and science. In all, he spent seven years as a student, gaining a reputation both for his academic brilliance and for his extravagant social life. Towards the end of his university career he started to criticize the Christianity upheld by his father and to look for a new set of values. In 1841 he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen and devoted himself to his writing. During the next ten years he produced a flood of discourses and no fewer than twelve major philosophical essays, many of them written under noms de plume. Notable are Either/Or (1843), Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and The Sickness unto Death (1849). By the end of his life Kierkegaard had become an object of public ridicule and scorn, partly because of a sustained feud that he had provoked in 1846 with the satirical Danish weekly the Corsair, partly because of his repeated attacks on the Danish State Church. Few mourned his death in November 1855, but during die early twentieth century his work enjoyed increasing acclaim and he has done much to inspire both modern Protestant theology and existentialism. Today Kierkegaard is attracting increasing attention from philosophers and writers ‘inside’ and outside the postmodern tradition.
ALASTAIR HANNAY was born to Scottish parents in Plymouth, Devon, in 1932 and educated at Edinburgh Academy, the University of Edinburgh and University College, London. In 1961 he became a resident of Norway, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has been a frequent visiting professor at the University of California, at San Diego and Berkeley. Alastair Hannay has also translated Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death and Papers and Journals for Penguin Classics. His other publications include Mental Images – A Defence, Kierkegaard (Arguments of the Philosophers), Human Consciousness, Kierkegaard: A Biography, and Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays, as well as articles on diverse themes in philosophical collections and journals.
This abridgement contains two kinds of omission: cuts of varying length in the pieces translated and one essay omitted in its entirety. The former are marked […] in the text, while other, similar indications (e.g.… and –) are in the original. By far the greatest number and longest omissions of this kind, some extending to several pages, occur in Part Two. The essay omitted, along with shorter passages which make reference to it, is from Part One. It is ‘Den første Kjærlighed, Lystspil i een Act af Scribe, oversat af J. L. Heiberg’ (‘First Love, Comedy in One Act by Scribe, translated by J. L. Heiberg’). For comments on both kinds of omission, see the introduction.
Paragraph divisions have been added to the original text where appropriate; the original contains often very long paragraphs, sometimes stretching over several pages.
Personal and place (including street) names have largely been left as in the original.
I am deeply grateful to my editor, Christine Collins, for suggesting many stylistic improvements.
Like the unfortunate madman who says he’ll climb down into Dovrefjell to blow up the whole world with a syllogism, what was needed was someone who could, to everyone’s knowledge, climb really deep down into the whole world of mediation, mediocrity, and spiritlessness to plant there, for all to see, the explosive either/or.*
WHEN Kierkegaard wrote these words in 1852, nine years after the publication of Either/Or, he was looking back on his working life as a deed on behalf of Christian awakening. By then his targets had become the Danish clergy: ‘servants of Christianity’ who, in the prevailing tendency to ‘idolize mediocrity’, had ‘shrewdly’ exploited the ‘pagan optimism’ which made Christianity commensurable with all things finite, and managed to reap the benefits of a ‘both/and’ which made being a Christian just another item on the list.
Either/Or had no such clear-cut target. It was written still some time before the notion of a ‘leap’ into a distinctively Christian point of view crystallized in Kierkegaard’s writings. The motivation for the work was probably a combination of two things: the fateful choice Kierkegaard had just made in his own life by breaking off an engagement and his confrontation with the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, from whose lectures in Berlin he sought a philosophical answer to Hegelianism. Schelling (in lectures published posthumously as Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology) was presenting reality (or ‘actuality’) as a free action of a personal God, instead of as the outcome of historical or spiritual necessity. Though at first enthusiastic,* Kierkegaard soon saw that Schelling’s was not the promised radical criticism of Hegelian philosophy he had hoped for. What was needed was a ‘doubled-edged little dagger’ with which he could ‘assassinate’ the whole of reality: the ‘either/or’.†
In March 1842, after four months in Berlin, Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen. Either/Or was published on 20 February the following year. According to Kierkegaard himself it took eleven months to write. Part Two was written first and already completed while he was in Berlin; most of Part One was written after his return.‡ The ‘editor’s’ preface, written last, was ready in November 1842. The official chronology gives approximately 7 December 1841 as the date of completion of the second of the two main sections of Part Two. So, assuming he wrote the sections consecutively and in Berlin, as he must have if eleven months is an accurate estimate, that is a truly astonishing achievement, all the more so in view of the fact that he was at the same time attending lectures at the University. The completion dates of the essays in Part One indicate that these too were written in a different order from that in which they eventually appeared. Thus the concluding ‘Seducer’s Diary’ was completed before the first main essay on the ‘Immediate Erotic Stages’. This suggests that the writing itself may not have followed any conscious plan or strategy discernible in the work as we now have it.
This is part of the fascination of Either/Or. True to its title, Kierkegaard’s classic places many choices in its would-be reader’s path and almost as many temptations – mostly, as hinted here, of interpretation. But there are also practical choices and temptations to consider, the first prompted by the work’s sheer size: Must I really read the whole thing? The standard two-volume format invites a rather handy answer to that question by offering a prior choice: Do I have to buy both volumes?
Vain searches for the first volume among shelves full of copies of the second quickly reveal the outcome of that short-lived choice. Although what this particular preference very likely indicates is the continuing reputation of Kierkegaard’s portrayals of the aesthetic way of life, rather than penury, say, or normal human postponement, the author himself would hardly approve. Commenting on the work’s critics, Kierkegaard says, ‘If someone starts by saying “either” – and doesn’t conceal from the listener that the first clause is going to be a very long one, you owe it to him either to ask him not to begin or to listen also to his “or”.’* An advantage of the single-volume version offered here is that it ensures that would-be readers give themselves the chance also to read Kierkegaard’s ‘or’.
Against that, however, we are offering an abridgement, which surely deprives readers of a choice the author would definitely wish them to retain. Indeed Kierkegaard says one should either read the whole or not read it at all. So what justification is there for not merely defying the author’s express wishes here, but also for disallowing a privilege any reader of a classic is surely entitled to, namely to read such a work in its entirety?
The original 1843 edition, to whose reception Kierkegaard was reacting, was also in two volumes. Perhaps in view of his comments a second edition, of 1849, appeared in a single volume. But later editions, encumbered with an increasingly demanding annotational apparatus (to say nothing of introductions), have been forced into the two-volume format by plain bulk. The most obvious justification for an abridgement, therefore, is the making available once more of a portable (and readable) single-volume edition able nevertheless to incorporate at least a minimum of annotational material and an introduction. Naturally, if the cuts involve a serious loss of meaning, that is not a satisfactory reason. Since, however, a lengthy discussion of this question would be self-defeating in the present context, we must let the following clarifications and comments suffice.
Besides the omission of a few ‘diapsalmata’, one shorter essay, ‘The First Love’, is omitted in its entirety from Part One (as well as short sections in other essays making reference to it). A commentary on a one-act comedy by the French dramatist A. E. Scribe, this was the outcome of an essay Kierkegaard had apparently begun before forming any clear idea of the later project. The comedy was familiar to Copenhagen theatregoers, who would also be among Kierkegaard’s readers, and they would be in an excellent position to appreciate this illustration of an important idea in the work. But the commentary undoubtedly loses something in narrative coherence to readers lacking that familiarity, and since the idea itself is discussed copiously elsewhere in the work, it was decided to omit this essay in preference to others.
The omissions from Part Two are of a different kind. Although conveniently contributing to the provision of a slimmer volume, the cuts here are designed primarily to bring the line of Vilhelm’s argument into greater relief and thus to help it make a more immediate impact upon the reader. Whatever the purist’s misgivings, the result is at least better than the far more drastic abridgements usually resorted to, patched out of passages quoted out of context in textbooks.
As for Kierkegaard’s own insistence that the work be read in its entirety or not at all, that too should be read in context. Kierkegaard is complaining that although they have been provided with both an ‘either’ and an ‘or’, his critics have shown interest only in the ‘either’, some only in the ‘Seducer’s Diary’. By saying ‘read it all or not at all’, Kierkegaard means first of all ‘read at least both my “either” and my “or”’.
With these practical decisions behind us and a firm reader’s commitment to a qualified ‘both/and’, there remain the choices, and temptations, of interpretation. The situation is less straightforward than it can seem. That is, one cannot immediately assume that the point or significance of Either/Or is adequately put by saying that the work provides readers with the opportunity to ask themselves which of the two points of view represented they themselves prefer. Many questions intervene. Just how distinct are the two points of view? Why can’t they be combined? What if we don’t feel like assenting to either? And isn’t it really obvious that we are supposed to assent in the end to the ethical point of view anyway? But then what if I don’t feel like doing that? Must I conclude that I’ve missed something, or is it because something is missing in me?
Later generations are sometimes said to be better placed to make sense of a significant work of literature than its contemporaries. That is claimed particularly in the case of a significantly innovative work, a category to which Either/Or clearly belongs. The reason offered is that the contemporary lacks the perspective needed for seeing the work’s real significance, and lacks it necessarily since the perspective and its distance are not yet in place.* That may well be true, but time can complicate the picture as much as clarify it. There are two mutually reinforcing factors why this should be especially true of Either/Or.
One factor is a general truth about literary classics. They become parts of traditions which they help to sustain but also to change. Readings of them can therefore reflect two quite different points of view: that of their origin and that of their (always provisional) destination. No doubt it is also true that what makes a work a classic (something one of the essays in Part One of Either/Or is much concerned with) is in part its ability to perform these functions at the propitious time. Since this factor is bound up in Kierkegaard’s case with his reputation as ‘the father of existentialism’, there is a not unnatural tendency to read Either/Or as an expression of such modern existentialist notions as that of radical commitment, of which more in a moment. This perspective obscures the fact that Either/Or is Kierkegaard’s first main work, and therefore also the possibility that one can read it in a more historical light. There is also the fact – though one might well choose to ignore it, believing an author’s works once completed to be self-sufficient – of Kierkegaard’s own changing attitudes to the work.
Compounding this confusion is the second factor: the author’s notorious practice of concealing himself behind a barrage of pseudonyms. Either/Or is exemplary in this respect, wrapped as it is in several layers of pseudonymity. The two main parts are assigned to two fictitious authors, the first part containing what is at least made to look like a diary by a third author, and the second containing a sermon by a fourth. On top of that the work is as a whole presented by a pseudonymous editor in a fictitious preface.
Why such subterfuge? Well, of course it wasn’t really subterfuge on Kierkegaard’s part. Nobody was taken in, at least not for long, and given the pseudonyms Kierkegaard chose it would be ludicrous to suppose he intended that they should be. At most he may have hoped to spread uncertainty for a while as to whether it was he or someone else lurking behind the strange Latinized pseudonyms.
But then again these pseudonyms are not just means of concealment. Literal translations can disclose their special signatures in the form of a variety of points of departure, positions, or perspectives. Thus Johannes de silentio, the ‘author’ of Fear and Trembling, writes about something of which he himself says one cannot intelligibly speak, namely that Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Isaac should be an act of faith.* Of Either/Or, Kierkegaard later wrote that when writing the work he was ‘already in a cloister, which thought is hidden in the pseudonym: Victor Eremita’.† What does that tell us? Kierkegaard says in the same passage that when writing the book he had long given up the thought of a comfortingly marital solution to life. Although it is not clear whether he means life in general or his own, the remark at least indicates that he himself was not prepared to follow Vilhelm’s advice; yet that hardly justifies the inference that Kierkegaard himself thought the advice should not be followed. Nor does it justify our saying of Victor Eremita, as does one commentator, that he is ‘no more taken in by the aesthete’s paean to enjoyment than he is by the Judge’s vision of marriage’.*
Yet that is surely an interesting possibility; it would mean that at least from the fictitious editor’s point of view, the proper conclusion to draw from reading Either/Or is ‘neither/nor’. So although the fact that Eremita is looking at things from the coolness of a cloister doesn’t indeed force us to assume that he occupies some vantage-point superior to the two he presents, the ultimate ‘significance’ of Either/Or – even in Kierkegaard’s mind – might still be that he does occupy that position, and that we should therefore somehow seek in deficiencies of both views the basis of a third.
But then, whether we place Eremita above, below, or behind his two protagonists, we are still one layer away from Kierkegaard himself. So we can still think of him as occupying another position. Or none. This latter is a useful idea. One way of looking at the pseudonymity is to note how it enables Kierkegaard to disown authority for what he writes. It ‘scrambles’ the author–reader link in a way that allows the writings to enjoy a genuinely independent existence, letting them become considerations in the mind of the reader, to do there whatever work they have it in themselves to do.† Moreover, if dissolving the semblance or pretence of authority inherent in acknowledged authorship is one advantage of pseudonymity, another – the opposite side of the same coin – is that it also absolves a writer of personal responsibility for the views expressed, thus freeing him of the potential restrictions on movement imposed by an accumulating authorial past.
Time can not only make the search for a literary work’s meaning complicated, it can positively distort that meaning. This factor is important in assessing a quite common reaction to Part Two. Judge Vilhelm strikes many as a hopeless bore and hypocrite. And there can be no doubt that our modern climate of opinion makes his defence of marriage look very like a classic case of male chauvinism. In deference to the author, those who see Vilhelm in this light may then suppose that this is what Kierkegaard intended. But then there are also other negative responses that conflict with this one. Some see in Vilhelm a fantast, a romantic, playing the same kind of game as his young friend the aesthete, but with his dreams being played out in social and family forms. Both these responses may be due to a cultural cleft. Thus we might surmise that our modern age has lost (as surely almost by definition it has) certain kinds of background attitudes necessary for taking Vilhelm’s seriousness as seriously as he himself takes it – and as seriously as he would like the aesthete to take it. If that hypothesis were true, we would then have to ask whether the modern positions or perspectives from which we make such judgements are in some universally valid sense superior to those envisioned for his readers by Kierkegaard. But the possibility would also have to be faced that we have lapsed into a position already envisioned by Kierkegaard, indeed into something Vilhelm himself might feel justified in calling ‘despair’. Might not the conclusion we reach after reading Either/Or, then, be that we, or most of us, are ‘mere’ aesthetes?
Thus, apart from the possibility of a neither/nor reading, a crucial question which awaits the person who decides against that reading, and assumes therefore that Kierkegaard definitely intends one of the two views presented to be life-affirming, is ‘Which?’.
We must be careful to separate that question from another, namely, ‘Which, if either, do I take to be life-affirming?’. Whether due to the cultural cleft or just to a significant shift in climate, it is of course quite plausible that a reader’s response to Either/Or should be quite different from Kierkegaard’s own. But that raises another question that must be answered before the two questions can be taken to be as different as may at first be supposed. That question is: ‘In writing Either/Or did Kierkegaard believe it more important that readers decide for themselves which life-view is life-affirming than that they should see the matter as he did?’ But even there we haven’t reached rock bottom. We can also wonder whether Kierkegaard, had he suspected that Vilhelm’s case might lose its appeal, could have approved of attempts to update his portrait of the ethical in order to restore that appeal, for example by making Vilhelm a feminist.
Alternatively, in order to escape this plethora of options, the reader may choose another, totally ignoring what Kierkegaard might have meant and simply reading the work as though first published today, and reading it in an altogether open-minded way just to see where the portrait fits and to find out how far the choices can affect one’s value-horizon.
Consistently with a negative evaluation of Vilhelm’s case for the ethical goes a typically modern predilection for his aesthetic counterpart. Indeed it could be said that the less conviction Vilhelm’s portrayal of the supposedly fulfilling life of the ethicist carries, the more plausibly his young friend appears to us in the guise of the modern hero, richly egocentric, tragically melancholic, excitingly nihilistic, daringly imaginative. There is indeed a cultural stereotype of the aesthete that fits well with Kierkegaard’s portrait. It is amply represented in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, no better perhaps than in the one-act plays of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931).* Looking at the work in this light, favouring as it does a monocular focusing on Kierkegaard’s ‘either’, we can simply choose to ignore whatever evidence there is that Kierkegaard is conducting a campaign on behalf of his ethical ‘or’. We prize instead his contribution to a progressive aesthetic culture. Perhaps we can even broaden the perspective in a binocular direction just enough to reveal the ethicist as representative of a powerful but oppressive tradition unfriendly to life and ready for replacement by some aesthetic alternative, even ripe for some sabotage from the aesthetic camp itself.
The fact that it would not be wholly perverse to choose to look at Either/Or in this way is an indication of the work’s immense cultural resources. But it also helps us to see more clearly just what kind of war Kierkegaard thought he was waging, against whom, and with what victory in mind. The target or enemy was philosophy. That in itself dictates that the weapons with which he was committed to prosecuting his campaign were literary rather than philosophical. It was the spirit of philosophy itself, incarnate in Hegel, that Kierkegaard was out to destroy, and in order to break with Hegel he could not resort to the discursive and systematic methods of the Hegelians themselves. Kierkegaard had to appeal to his reader’s sensibilities. Hegel was to be destroyed in subsequent works (notably in Concluding Unscientific Postscript) mainly by appeal to the reader’s sense of the ridiculous. But the most important point to be clear about is that the victory Kierkegaard had in mind was not merely the destruction of Hegel; it was the retrieval from philosophy of legitimate human goals (ethical and religious understanding) which he believed philosophy had usurped and dreadfully distorted. This positive appeal, then, had to be first of all to our senses of fulfilment in life, in pleasure or a sense of beauty, from which alone the ethically crucial sense of a want of fulfilment could then be elicited in the reader. Kierkegaard was thus able to put his native literary talent to the edifying task of regenerating ethics in the ordinary-life situations that make up a human life. The means he created are the books of his pseudonymous authorship.
In an important comment on Either/Or, ‘leaked’ by another of his pseudonyms, Kierkegaard gives us to understand that the work’s special purpose was to ‘exhibit the existential relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical in an existing individual’, the motive behind this being the need to remind people ‘what it means to exist, and what inwardness signifies’. This was something that, ‘because of the great increase of knowledge’, his age had forgotten. ‘Knowledge’ here is an ironic reference to Hegelian philosophy, a ‘system’ of thought which accords no ultimate value to subjectivity, sensibility or inwardness. Of the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), criticized for subordinating the realm of knowledge to that of feeling and faith, this other pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, says:
Poor Jacobi! Whether anyone visits your grave I do not know, but I know that the paragraph-plough digs all your eloquence, all your inwardness under, while a few scant words are registered in the System as what you amount to. It says of him that he represented feeling with enthusiasm; a reference like that makes fun of both feeling and enthusiasm, whose secret is precisely that they cannot be reported at second-hand …*
Whatever the ethical view of life has to offer, then, it can only direct its appeal to individual sensibility. But that of course means directing it to where the aesthetic view of life also makes its appeal. So aesthetics is where one inevitably has to begin, and that applies equally to the religious view of life, not portrayed in this work but glimpsed in the ‘sermon’ appended as a ‘last word’ (Ultimatum) to Judge Vilhelm’s second letter. In the same passage Climacus comments on the absence of a distinctively religious perspective in Either/Or, but says that the fact that his age had forgotten what it is to exist religiously implied also that people had first of all forgotten what it was to exist as human beings. Either/Or is the required reminder, a necessary prolegomenon to the reminders to come, about what it is to lead, first, a religious existence and then, secondly, a specifically Christian existence.
We now find ourselves face to face with one final interpretational either/or. As we noted earlier, reading Kierkegaard from within the perspective of modern existentialism, some people interpret the choice between an aesthetic and an ethical view of life in terms of a ‘radical choice’. In place of ‘radical’ the term ‘criterionless’ is sometimes used; a choice made according to some criterion not exclusively part of the view itself would not be criterionless, and the choice would therefore not be radical enough to cover the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical point of view. Each Kierkegaardian ‘stage’ or ‘sphere’ of existence in effect represents an atomically distinctive answer to the question, ‘What is it essentially to be a human being?’. The radical nature of the choice lies in the fact that in choosing one of the stages you are also choosing the kinds of reason available to you for defending the choice.
The peculiarly ‘modern’ touch to this is the belief that the notion of a criterionless choice is a way of expressing an insight the gaining of which marks the coming of age of our culture. It involves recognizing an irreducible multiplicity of cultural traditions, irreducible in the sense that there is no general basic principle for deciding between them. If we have to conclude from this, as well we might, that values in general are no more than expressions of habitual and basically arbitrary preferences, we may look on this positively as a release from bad philosophical habits, or else negatively as a cultural nightmare. But some people advocate an ‘Aristotelian’ solution which (to exploit a not at all inappropriately biological metaphor) would let values grow in specific cultures. Here the notion of ‘radicalness’ would apply only in the sense that given cultural contexts were what provided values with their ‘roots’. Those who advocate such a solution see Existentialists with their ‘radical choices’ as engaged in a hopeless task, trying with the mere choosing to confer on the choice that substantial quality it can only acquire within a culture to which the chooser also belongs.*
If one considers briefly what this idea of a radical choice implies, the criticism seems justified. It means that the chooser stands outside the options offered, so whichever one is picked is selected as arbitrarily as one picks a chocolate from a box not knowing what kind of centre it has, though here one is not even supposed to care. Since there are no operative preferences upon which the selection is based – they all belong to the alternatives on offer – it would be appropriate to describe this as a case of picking rather than choosing. By the same token there can be no inter-‘stage’ or inter-‘sphere’ dialogue. Naturally, there can be dialogue in the sense of conversations about matters of shared interest, swapping of information and so on, as well as disputes about things on which there is disagreement. But there can be no way of settling basic disputes, no shared basis of considerations to which, say, an ethicist can appeal to try to win over an aesthete. So if Vilhelm offers arguments to his friend, these will have no effect if they are arguments sincerely offered in defence of the ethical way of life. If they are to have any effect, either his friend must already have taken leave of the aesthetic world and be able and willing to see the point of arguments based on ethical criteria, or else Vilhelm will have to deliberately phrase his arguments in terms of aesthetic values to which he himself does not subscribe. He will then have to lure his friend into the ethical with arguments that, if he really stood by them, would place him in the aesthetic world alongside his friend.
Yet however radically the views presented in Either/Or differ, it is hard not to see the work as having the character of a dialogue. Part One contains implicit arguments against the ethical life-view, which are then rebutted in Part Two. There are also such arguments in Part Two, in the form of objections to ethical ideals that Vilhelm recalls his young friend having voiced and to which he replies. Further, it would be hard to read the two main sections in Part Two otherwise than as a sustained argument in favour of the ethical life-view, which is also continually underpinned by arguments against the aesthetic life-view. So ‘either’ there is a great deal of indirect persuasion and subterfuge, hardly a good advertisement at least for a supposedly ethical life-view, ‘or’ the radical-choice reading is mistaken.
But since dialogues do nevertheless aim at agreement, if only on some position that turns out to be neither of the original alternatives, and since agreement surely requires some kind of choice on the part of at least one of the participants, there should still be room for an either/or and so for a choice. There are, however, a number of quite different ways in which we might think of a choice occurring in conclusion of a dialogue. One would be where one party convinces the other by making him see how what he says ‘stands to reason’. There would, however, be no appeal to ‘inwardness’ here; the dialogue might be said to occur only at a ‘paragraph-ploughing’ level. Another way, that did appeal to inwardness and sensibility, could be one in which the convinced party simply goes over to the new position as a matter of course in the light of certain appeals to which he was already attuned but about whose relevance to the case in hand he had not been clear. The function of the dialogue would be to bring about that clarity and the result might still, though only just, be called a kind of choice.
Neither of these captures the sense of choice required by Vilhelm of his young friend’s entering upon the ethical life. That choice, as the reader discovers, is said to be ‘of oneself’; and part of what that means is precisely that one no longer regards oneself as a being who, as in the second case, moves from one position to another simply from the weight or pressure of argument or circumstance. The ethical life involves rejecting any idea of oneself as just a passive accumulator, or in the case of the mature aesthete also imaginative manipulator, of life’s contingent blessings; it requires acceptance of the quite different idea that one is a responsible agent. The ‘choice of oneself’ is therefore one that cuts short the passivity and imaginative manipulation. It requires, first, that one acknowledge a peculiarly human ability, indeed a need, to ask what it is essentially to be a human being. Second, it requires that one take this ability at its face value, as a genuine freedom to stake out one’s own future according to a ‘view of life’; and, third, it requires that the view of life one adopts be one in which one is ‘revealed’ in a context of familial and social responsibilities. ‘Revelation’ here does not mean the disclosure of a self that was previously hidden; a hidden ‘self’ is precisely not a self in Vilhelm’s sense. The choice of oneself is the choice of visible selfhood, placing the chooser firmly within the area of public morality, and amenable for the first time to the ethical categories of good and bad, praise and blame.
This choice is clearly still a radical one. And its radicalness still lies in the total redefining of the values of a human life. It is important to realize the compass of the redefinition. It isn’t a matter simply of turning over a new leaf; the choice of oneself means rewriting the whole book. In choosing oneself, as Vilhelm says, one takes responsibility for one’s past and ‘repents’ for not having taken on this responsibility earlier. The ethicist’s task as Vilhelm sees it, then, is to persuade the aesthete of the urgency of the choice. But this task is made the easier by the fact that the mature aesthete’s life has already taken a form which an ethical redefinition of values can be seen to fit, as easily in principle as a glove fits a hand, the actual practice requiring only the will to put it on. His aestheticism is driving him out of the world in which his pleasure is sought; it has driven him into a corner from where he has to rely on his ingenuity and imagination to keep things going, on his ability to enjoy things in reflection, to enjoy the idea of things rather than the things themselves. He should be well disposed in principle at least, then, to seeing what Vilhelm is getting at when he describes the aesthete’s life as one of ‘despair’. But he should be able also to see the point of Vilhelm’s advice to ‘choose despair’ rather than, say, some occupation or marrying, where these would be undertaken as expedients for just the kinds of reasons that an aesthete must give. Finally, then, if that is the case he might also be able to see how both getting a job and marrying might be radically reconceived as vehicles of human fulfilment instead of as expedients.
Getting a job and marrying were things Kierkegaard himself conspicuously failed to do. The background to that fact and a short account of the events in Kierkegaard’s life prior and subsequent to the publication of Either/Or may help to put its subject-matter in perspective, as well as providing the reader unfamiliar with the details of Kierkegaard’s life with the benefit of a brief portrait.
The sequence of events which turned Søren Aabye Kierkegaard to full-time authorship began in 1837 when he met Regine Olsen, daughter of a Copenhagen dignitary. Regine was then fourteen years old. The following year Kierkegaard’s father died, aged eighty-one (Kierkegaard was then twenty-five). Kierkegaard’s father had exercised a largely oppressive influence on his son from early childhood, and Kierkegaard later said that he had never enjoyed a proper childhood. Two years before the meeting with Regine he had been describing Christianity, associated with his father, as a debilitating influence and, looking about him for some other idea ‘to live or die for’,* he gave up his studies and led outwardly the life of an aesthete and wit. Entries in his Journal tell a different story. Kierkegaard was undergoing a period of deep and even occasionally suicidal depression. But the year before his father died came the first meeting with Regine, and Kierkegaard effected a reconciliation with his father shortly before the latter’s death.
Just one month later Kierkegaard published his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, though the title derives not from his father’s death but the death in the same year of Søren’s teacher and friend, Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838). A little over two years later Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine. He underwent practical training for a career in the State Church and in 1841 published and publicly defended his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. Since he had already preached his first sermon, all seemed set for a life of conventional civic virtue. But well before the end of that year Kierkegaard had returned Regine’s engagement ring. The reasons for this turn of events are much disputed. The crux, however, seems to have been Kierkegaard’s sense of his inability to ‘reveal’ himself as civic life, and in particular the life of a husband and father, required. By November, soon after the defence of his thesis, the break had become final and Kierkegaard was on his way to Berlin, the first of four visits which were his only journeys outside Denmark. It was from this first visit, ostensibly for the purpose of attending Schelling’s lectures, that Kierkegaard brought back the manuscripts containing Judge Vilhelm’s defence of romantic love and marriage.
The publication of Either/Or in February 1843 was followed in October by two slimmer volumes, Repetition and Fear and Trembling (both mostly written on a second visit to Berlin not long after the publication of Either/Or). All these works deal with the problem of entering society (or ‘realizing the universal’, an expression introduced by Vilhelm). The same theme was pursued in the substantial Stages on Life’s Way, published in April 1845, though now with a distinctive religious aspect more in evidence. But almost a year previously, in June 1844, there had appeared two books introducing new topics. Philosophical Fragments sought, in subtle and spare language, to offer a Christian alternative to Hegelian philosophy, though without mentioning the latter. The theme was elaborated more explicitly, at great length, and with much irony and humour, almost two years later in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. Within a few days of Philosophical Fragments, however, there had also appeared The Concept of Dread (alternatively ‘The Concept of Anxiety’), an examination of the psychological background to the experience of sin. Alongside this already impressive production, Kierkegaard also published twenty-one ‘edifying’ and ‘Christian’ discourses under his own name, some of them published on the same days as works under pseudonyms.
As its title shows, Concluding Unscientific Postscript was supposed to mark the end of Kierkegaard’s work as a writer. A few days before the manuscript was delivered to the printer, Kierkegaard provoked a feud with a satiric weekly called Corsair (Corsaren). In a volume of essays by a well-known literary figure and aesthete, P. L. Møller, he had chanced upon a biting criticism of his own latest work at the time, Stages on Life’s Way. Not altogether coincidentally, Møller was the reputed model for Johannes, the pseudonymous author of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’. Kierkegaard, who knew that Møller sustained a connection with Corsair which he nevertheless wished to keep secret so as not to spoil his prospects for a Chair at the University, divulged the connection in a newspaper article under a pseudonym from the work criticized, at the same time wondering why the pseudonyms had been singled out for the dubious honour of being spared Corsair’s abuse. Corsair’s response was immediate. The weekly began mercilessly to pillory, not the pseudonyms, but Kierkegaard in person. Three weeks before Postscript was to be published, and while the Corsair business was at its height, Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal that he felt his time as an author was over, and even before the feud it appears he had given thought once more to the priesthood. There remained only one more literary chore: the proof-reading of a review of a book called Two Ages, a review in which he may have felt that he had properly rounded off his work by spelling out its social and political implications.
By the beginning of the following year, however, Kierkegaard was dismissing these plans as a lapse of nerve and the author was again in full spate. The same year (1847) he published Edifying Discourses in Different Spirits and the substantial Works of Love, followed in the spring of 1848 by Christian Discourses and in 1849 by The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air and Three Discourses at Communion on Fridays. There then followed two works under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus: The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity.
These later works display a new stringency. Perhaps the Corsair affair, which left Kierkegaard an object of public ridicule, enforced a polarization between him and his society. His own suffering for truth was set off against the complacency of a bourgeois public which manifested its self-contentment not least in the manner of its religious observances, and whose religious leaders, formerly close associates of Kierkegaard and friends of his family, struck him as exemplars of self-seeking worldliness. Thus, in a way, the social and political criticism that emerged in what might have been Kierkegaard’s final work, the review of Two Ages, was a seed that developed in the atmosphere created by the feud with Corsair to become a general condemnation of the age in which he lived. The Sickness unto Death diagnoses the problem as despair, but as the preface to that work says, this time as the sickness and not, as Vilhelm has it in Either/Or, the remedy.*
In the next few years Kierkegaard wrote little until he unleashed a vitriolic attack on the State Church, which he now saw clearly as the real root and bastion of spiritual complacency and compromise. During these years he lived in increasingly straitened circumstances, and the remainder of his inheritance and the modest proceeds of his authorship went to financing the final assault, amongst other things through the publication of his own broadsheet, The Instant. This went through nine issues before Kierkegaard fell ill, collapsed in the street, and died in hospital some six weeks later, probably of a lung infection. He was forty-two years old. On his sickbed he confided to Emil Boesen, his friend from boyhood, indeed by that time his only friend, now a pastor and the only member of the Church he would see (including his own brother), that his life had been a ‘great and to others unknown and incomprehensible suffering’, which looked like ‘pride and vanity’ but ‘wasn’t’. Kierkegaard regretted he hadn’t married and taken on an official position. His funeral was the occasion of what may have been one of the first student demonstrations, led by his nephew, an early supporter, who protested at the Church’s insistence on officiating at the committal proceedings, contrary to the deceased’s wishes.
We remarked earlier that since Either/Or was an early work we might ask ourselves what Kierkegaard thought about it later. But it was also suggested that this question could quite properly be ignored. Once a literary or a philosophical work has been launched on the world, readers are no more obliged to concern themselves with than to share in whatever embarrassments it may have caused its author. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s deathbed regrets about not having married or occupied an official position kindle one’s curiosity. And we still don’t really know what Kierkegaard ever thought of Vilhelm. Our comments here, now that we are focusing on the author and not the work, can be treated initially as nothing but an appendix to the biography.
One question relates to selfhood. In a note from the year Either/Or was published, Kierkegaard tells us that the reason Part Two begins with a defence of marriage is that marriage is life’s ‘deepest form of revelation’.* Might then the later Kierkegaard wish to allow that emerging from the cover of his pseudonyms to conduct a public campaign against the established Church also counted as a form of revelation? Or does his regret at not having married amount to a belief that he remained incompletely revealed and therefore that he failed to attain true selfhood? On the other hand, the later pseudonym Anti-Climacus added a direct God-relationship to Vilhelm’s specification of selfhood. So here Kierkegaard may have felt he had the better of Vilhelm in spite of conspicuously failing to live up to the latter’s ideal of the ethical. Much of Kierkegaard’s working life was spent worrying whether what it accomplished justified his being an ‘exception’. One way of putting the problem would be to ask whether there was a ‘selfhood’ reserved for martyrs. The deeper question would then be whether he deserved that status. One way of construing the Corsair affair is to see it as an attempt to hasten the necessary trial by ordeal before it was too late to run the course.
There is also the problem of Vilhelm’s portrayal of the relation between the sexes in marriage, and whether the limitations in it so apparent to us today are expressions of Kierkegaard’s own views at the time and if so whether these ever changed. The year before his death he wrote that what Vilhelm says about ‘the woman’ is ‘what you could expect from a husband defending marriage with ethical enthusiasm’. Kierkegaard seems to suggest the ethical enthusiasm is somehow false. He says that although man has a lust for life, left to himself he finds no way to awaken it. When the woman, however, in whom this lust is already alive, appears before him she awakens his ‘unspecified’ lust and specifies it.* So Vilhelm’s marriage is really no more than an expression of his own shortcomings and needs, and Vilhelm himself really as much of an egoist as his friend the aesthete. So far so good, but this is where Kierkegaard stops. Or rather, he says that man is constitutionally ‘spirit’, which as readers of The Sickness unto Death will recognize, means that he is fated to exercise what was referred to here earlier as the human ability to ask what it is essentially to be a human being. Two things follow: first that the exercise of this ability deprives man of his lust for life, and second, that the only way for him to supplement this loss is for woman to lack this peculiarly human ability. An unholy combination if ever there was one: Vilhelm’s stolid chauvinism gives way to a cynical symbiotitism. Does Kierkegaard have any better defence of marriage to offer than that of an enthusiastic ethicist?
Our motto, the reader will recall, has Kierkegaard using his either/or to drive out mediocrity and ‘spiritlessness’, along with the pagan optimism which made Christianity just one more item on the agenda of finitude. Here the either/or makes a clear separation between the finite life we lead, and would like to have a lust for, and the world of spirit for which life as we generally lead it is trivial and not lustworthy. ‘Drop all this egoistic trifling which people usually fill their lives with, doing business, marrying, begetting children, being something in the world; drop it, cut it all out – let your life be dedicated to loving God and devotion to humanity …’† The 1854 either/or spans an unbridgeable divide between petty bourgeois self-seeking and a life of unspecified self-effacement on behalf of the Good. Just where the things Vilhelm prizes find a place in a world defined by these stark alternatives is unclear, as indeed what it could be about them that gave us any sense of their value. The appeal of our 1841–2 either/or is that its ‘either’ is precisely not a life of mediocrity or spiritlessness. How Kierkegaard could have handled a spiritless life-view poetically is hard to conceive anyway. Such a life has no appeal. Nor does it lead anywhere. An aesthetic ‘either’ is one that its ‘or’ can sympathize with because that is where it can have come from; and it has the imagination and depth needed to grasp the force of appeals made to it to choose the ‘or’.
Edited by
VICTOR EREMITA
Abridged, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by
ALASTAIR HANNAY
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