Either/Or

Introduction

Kierkegaard’s first major book appeared in Copenhagen in February 1843 in two volumes, written largely in Berlin in the winter after he had broken off his engagement to Regine Olsen. A fictitious editor, Victor Eremita, presents it as papers found in an old writing desk. The first volume contains the writings of a young aesthete known only as “A”: aphorisms, essays on Mozart’s Don Giovanni and on boredom, and the “Diary of the Seducer”. In the second, Judge Wilhelm (“B”) defends marriage and the ethical choice of oneself in long letters to A. Neither author is given the last word; the reader has to decide. The book made Kierkegaard known in Copenhagen.

Connections

Criticizes

• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

More works by Søren Kierkegaard

• 1843Fear and Trembling
• 1844The Concept of Anxiety
• 1846Concluding Unscientific Postscript