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What is a poet? Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Of all the great philosophical writers, Kierkegaard was one of the greatest masters of literary form. In each work, he adapts a style and form that is appropriate to the particular point of view he is attempting to illustrate. In EITHER/OR I, he is concerned with showing various aspects of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence. Unlike the later stages of existence, the Aesthetic is extremely diverse, and can take more forms and be expressed in a larger number of shapes. Kierkegaard therefore writes a series of essays that bring out various aspects of the Aesthetic stage. Some of these are among his most famous writings. His essay on Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, "The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic" ranks among the most famous pieces of musical criticism ever written. Perhaps even more famous is "The Seducer's Diary," in which an individual records his attempts to snare a young woman, though more in the sense of a Mephistopheles than a Don Juan. My favorite section, and the one that illustrates an especially developed form of the aesthetic is "The Rotation of Crops," in which our anonymous author attempts to deal with the one great difficulty facing the Aesthetic Mode of Existence: boredom. As he writes, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Therefore, the challenge to the Aesthetic is to thrust away continually boredom, and in this essay our writer provides a guide to making life as interesting as possible. We are required to continually find new friends, new jobs, new interests, since all obligations lead to tedium. Marriage is, of course, to be avoided, since this is boring (the contrary to this will be asserted in EITHER/OR II). That this task is impossible is taken up in later works by Kierkegaard.
EITHER/OR begins in classic Kierkegaardian fashion. Kierkegaard was probably the greatest master of the Preface in the history of literature. His Prefaces are such masterpieces that they can profitably be read on their own, and he himself delighted in writing them to such a degree that he wrote one book that consisted in nothing but Prefaces. In the one to both volumes of EITHER/OR, a gentleman by the name of Victor Eremita explains how he accidentally discovered the papers filling the two volumes that had been hidden in a desk. He separates them into two groups, "A" and "B". He possesses no great certainty as to the authorship, but believes that one person may have written the first group, and another the second group. Or, alternately, that the author of the "A" papers may have written the "B" papers later in life. The latter is probably what Kierkegaard wants us to believe, for it is his fundamental belief that the Aesthetic mode of existence is doomed to failure, and that it is possible (though not necessary) that this could lead to a higher level of existence, The Ethical. This new stage is dealt with in the second volume of EITHER/OR.
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