This is a collection of essays and miscellanea devoted to the aesthetic values of life. Kierkegaard wraps the work in multiple layers of obfuscation. He assumes the persona of Victor Eremita, the editor of a correspondence of papers between two individuals, A and B. The papers have been supposedly found in a secret drawer of a wooden desk bought in secondhand shop. These layers of remove give Kierkegaard the comfort of deniability for his more outrageous assertions. Part 1 of “Either/Or” contains the supposed papers of the person dubbed A, a pure aesthete.
The first section is a collection of aphorisms in which A writes lines such as, “desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.” Much of A’s writing revolves around the mimetic impulses of human nature. Another central theme of of his writings is a brutal self-examination of his own inner life. “One ought to a be a riddle not only to others but also to oneself. I examine myself; when I am tired of that, I smoke a cigar for diversion and think: God knows what our Lord actually intended with me or what he wants to make of me.” The subject matter never deviates far from the pure aesthetic, but also contains the portrayal of the power dynamic in all human relationships. “Real enjoyment consists not in what one enjoys but in the idea…. Enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.”
The second section of A’s papers is an essay devoted to the supreme beauty of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” A exclaims, “Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everything—to whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, that I was terrified at the core of my being—you to whom I owe that I did not go through life without encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die without having loved, even though my love was unhappy.” He reflects on the difference in the enjoyment of music and language. “Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate…. Sensuous immediacy has its absolute medium in music.” A goes on to relate the process of desire in detail. “As soon as desire awakens or, more correctly, in and with its awakening, desire and the object of desire are separated; now desire breathes freely and soundly, whereas before it could not draw its breath because of that which was desired. When desire has not awakened, that which is desired fascinates and captivates—indeed, almost causes anxiety. The desire must have air, must find escape; this occurs through their being separated.”
The third essay is a reflection on tragedy in ancient Greek and modern dramas. A reflects, “In ancient tragedy, the action itself has an epic element; it is just as much an event as action. This, of course, is because the ancient world did not have subjectivity reflected in itself. Even if the individual moved freely, he nevertheless rested in substantial determinants, in the state, the family, in fate…. The hero’s downfall, therefore, is not a result solely of his action but is also a suffering, whereas in modern tragedy the hero’s downfall is not really suffering but is a deed…. The hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds…. But just as the action in Greek tragedy is something intermediate between action and the suffering, so also is guilt, and therein lies the tragic collision…. The Greek hero rests in his fate; his fate is unalterable; of that there can be no further discussion.”
The fourth essay is titled “Silhouettes Psychological Diversion.” A contrasts the forms of visual art with language. “Art is in the category of space, poetry in the category of time…. art depicts repose, poetry motion.” He goes on to contemplate inner sorrow and the possibility of its depiction in art. “Unhappy love is in itself the deepest sorrow for a woman, but it does not follow from this that even unhappy love engenders reflective sorrow…. Reflective sorrow, then, cannot become a subject for artistic portrayal. For one thing, it is never really present but is continually in the process of becoming; for another, the exterior, the visible, is a matter of unimportance and indifference.” It is buried so deep within the soul that reflective sorrow can never actually be seen and, therefore, portrayed in art. “The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is continually seeking its object; this seeking is the sorrow’s restlessness and its life.” A concludes with the supposition, “for only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.”
The fifth essay is a short piece titled “The Unhappiest One,” addressed to a fake secret society, “The Fellowship of the Dead” or “The Society of Buried Lives.” A states, “we, like the Roman soldiers, do not fear death, we know a worse calamity, and first and last, above all—it is to live…. Happy is the one who died in old age; happier is the one who died in youth; happiest is the one who died at birth; happiest of all the one who was never born.” A reoccurring theme in many of Kierkegaard’s works is the concept of recollection. “Recollection is above all the distinctive element of the unhappy ones, which is natural, because past time has the notable characteristic that it is past.” A ends in paradox, “See, language breaks down, and thought is confused, for who indeed is the happiest but the unhappiest and who the unhappiest but the happiest, and what is life but madness, and faith but foolishness, and hope but staving off of the evil day, and love but vinegar in the wound.”
In his sixth essay, A says of poets, “The reason poets are called priests is that they interpret life, but they do not want to be understood by the masses but only by those natures with sensitive hearts.” Poetry is esoteric writing. He continues, “So it is in life, where one always needs explanatory notes, but it ought not to be so in poetry. Then the spectator, free from care, can enjoy, can absorb undisturbed, the dramatic life.”
The penultimate piece returns to the theme of recollection. A writes, “every particular change still falls under the universal rule of the relation between recollecting and forgetting. It is in these two currents that all life moves, and therefore it is a matter of having them properly under one’s control. Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot limit himself…. To be able to forget always depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends on how one experiences reality…. Thus nil admirari [marvel at nothing] is the proper wisdom of life. No part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to…. The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for to remember poetically is actually only an expression of forgetting. When I remember poetically, my experience has already undergone the change of having lost everything painful. In order to be able to recollect in this way, one must be very much aware of how one lives, especially of how one enjoys.” A concludes with a plea for the arbitrary. “Arbitrariness is the whole secret. It is popularly believed that there is no art to being arbitrary, and yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not himself run wild in it but himself has pleasure from it. One does not enjoy the immediate object but something else that one arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended. One enjoys something totally accidental; one considers the whole of existence [Tilvaerelse] from this standpoint…. It is very advantageous to let the realities of life be undifferentiated in an arbitrary interest like that…. The eye with which one sees actuality must be changed continually…. The accidental outside a person corresponds to the arbitrariness within him…. The most insignificant thing can accidentally become a rich material for amusement.”
The final section takes the form of “The Seducer’s Diary,” which is a selection of letters and notes that A has supposedly written to and about his latest conquest, Cordelia. Kierkegaard, as Victor Eremita, editor of A’s works, begins forebodingly, “a bad conscience can indeed make life interesting.” The editor continues, “For him [A], individuals were merely for stimulation; he discarded them as trees shake off their leaves—he was rejuvenated, the foliage withered.” A, then, writes, “It is not a particular beauty who captivates me, but a totality; a visionary picture floats past me in which all these feminine beings blend with one another and all these movements are seeking something, seeking repose in a picture that is not seen.” He continues on with his conception of love and of Platonic forms. “The image I have of her [Cordelia] hovers indefinitely somewhere between her actual and her ideal form…. It is not art to seduce a girl but it is a stroke of good fortune to find one who is worth seducing. —Love is full of mysteries…. If at first sight a girl does not make such a deep impression on a person that she awakens the ideal, then ordinarily the actuality is not especially desirable; but if she does, then no matter how experienced a person is he usually is rather overwhelmed.” For a woman the Platonic form excites slightly differently. “I do believe a young girl would prefer to be all alone with her ideal, that is, at certain moments, and precisely at those moments when it has the strongest effect on her mind. Even if her ideal has found an ever so perfect expression in a particular beloved object, there nevertheless are moments when she feels that in the ideal there is a vastness that the actuality does not have.”
A contrasts, explicitly, for the first time, the aesthetic from the ethical. “Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient; when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely langweiligt [boring].” Quickly, he returns to the aesthetic. “If a person does not know how to make erotic love the absolute, in comparison with which all other events vanish, then he should never let himself become involved in loving.” He also explicitly spells out his ideas on the proper course of love and its natural poetry. “I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and the point of love, who believes in love and knows it from the ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. All this I know; I also know that the highest enjoyment imaginable is to be loved, loved more than anything else in the world. To poetize oneself into a girl is an art; to poetize oneself out of her is a masterstroke. But the latter depends essentially on the former.” Finally, A concludes by summarizing his general opinion on aesthetics. “Woman still is and will continue to be an inexhaustible subject for contemplation for me, an everlasting overabundance for observations. The person who feels no need for this study can be whatever he wants to be in the world as far as I am concerned, but one thing he is not, he is no esthetician. What is glorious and divine about esthetics is that it is associated only with the beautiful; essentially it deals only with belles lettres and the fair sex.”
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