Work

Either/Or

Enten–Eller

Søren Kierkegaard·1843·Danish

About this text

Published under a pseudonym, Either/Or stages two ways of life, the aesthetic and the ethical, as voices in a found manuscript. The aesthete lives for pleasure, wit, and novelty; the ethical man commits. Neither voice is simply Kierkegaard. The reader must choose.

Either/Or is the word before which the folding doors of life fly open — and whether I go right or left, the road leads to the same outcome. The either/or is either universal or it is nothing at all. Not this or that, not the beautiful or the good, not the pleasant or the unpleasant, but the absolute either/or.

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