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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Either/Or (Kierkegaard book) | 8/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either/Or_(Kierkegaard_book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:53:29.518019+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Later reception === Although Either/Or, published in 1843, was Kierkegaard's first major book, it was one of his last books to be translated into English, as late as 1944. Frederick DeW. Bolman Jr. insisted that reviewers consider the book in this way: "In general, we have a right to discover, if we can, the meaning of a work as comprehensive as Either/Or, considering it upon its own merits and not reducing the meaning so as to fit into the author's later perspective. It occurred to me that this was a service to understanding Kierkegaard, whose esthetic and ethical insights have been much slighted by those enamored of his religion of renunciation and transcendence. ... Kierkegaard's brilliance seems to me to be showing that while goodness, truth, and beauty can not speculatively be derived one from another, yet these three are integrally related in the dynamics of a healthy character structure". David F. Swenson, a professor at the University of Minnesota, introduced three lectures about Kierkegaard in 1918 in which he "presented Soren Kierkegaard’s delineation of three fundamental modes of life: First, the Life of Enjoyment – Folly and Cleverness in the Pursuit of Pleasure; second, the Life of Duty – Realizing the Self through Victorious Accomplishments; third, the Life of Faith – The Religious Transformation of the Self through Suffering. Miguel de Unamuno published his 1914 novel Mist in response to his reading of Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer. Thomas Henry Croxall was impressed by "A"'s thoughts on music in the essay, "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic". Croxall argues that "the essay should be taken seriously by a musician because it makes one think, and think hard enough to straighten many of one's ideas; ideas, I mean, not only on art, but on life" and goes on to discuss the psychological, existential, and musical value of the work.
Reinhold Niebuhr questioned Kierkegaard's emphasis in his pastoral epistle at the end of Or. He wrote the following in 1949. The tendency of modern culture to see only the creative possibilities of human freedom makes the Christian estimate of the human situation seem morbid by contrast. Is not Kierkegaard morbid, even Christians are inclined to ask, when he insists that "before God man is always in the wrong"? Does such an emphasis not obscure the creative aspects of human freedom? Is it not true that men are able by increasing freedom to envisage a larger world and to assume a responsible attitude toward a wider and wider circle of claims upon their conscience? Does the Christian faith do justice, for instance, to the fact that increasing freedom has set the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," in a larger frame of reference than ever before in history? Is it not significant that we have reached a global situation in which we may destroy ourselves and each other if we fail to organize a new global "neighborhood" into a tenable brotherhood? Johannes Edouard Hohlenberg wrote a biography about Søren Kierkegaard in 1954 and in that book he speculated that the Diary of the Seducer was meant to depict the life of P.L. Moller who later (1845) wrote the articles in The Corsair detrimental to the character of Kierkegaard. The Diary of a Seducer by itself, is a provocative novella, and has been reproduced separately from Either/Or several times. John Updike said of the Diary, "In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity – a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast". Many authors were interested in separating the esthetic, the ethical and the religious but it may have been, as far as Kierkegaard was concerned, of more importance for the single individual to have a way to decide when one was becoming dominant over the other two. Henrik Stangerup, (1937–1998) a Danish writer, wrote three books as a way to illustrate Kierkegaard's three stages of existence, 1981, The Road to Lagoa Santa, which was about Kierkegaard's brother-in-law Peter Wilhelm Lund (the ethicist), 1985 The Seducer: It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe, Peder Ludvig Moller was the esthetic in that novel, and in 1991 Brother Jacob which describes Søren Kierkegaard as a Franciscan friar. In contemporary times, Either/Or received new life as a grand philosophical work with the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), where MacIntyre situates Either/Or as an attempt to capture the Enlightenment spirit set forth by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. After Virtue renewed Either/Or as an important ethical text in the Kantian vein, as mentioned previously. Although MacIntyre accuses Victor Eremita of failing to provide a criterion for one to adopt an ethical way of life, many scholars have since replied to MacIntyre's accusation in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.
=== In popular culture === The 1997 Elliott Smith album Either/Or derives its name from Either/Or, reflecting Smith's interest in philosophy, which he studied at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. The novel Either/Or by Elif Batuman is named after Kierkegaard's Either/Or, and the main character reflects on the themes of Kierkegaard's work within the book.
== References ==
=== Primary references ===
=== Secondary references and notes ===
== External links == Quotations related to Either/Or (Kierkegaard book) at Wikiquote Either/Or Spark notes Kierkegaard's Existentialism: an overview YouTube Lecture by Anders Kraal on Either/Or The Treatment of Love in Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or Kierkegaard "Either/Or" YouTube introduction to the book D. Anthony Storm's commentary on Either/Or Professor J Aaron Simmons Kierkegaard's 3 Stages of Life: Aesthetic, Ethical, & Religious YouTube Troy Wellington Smith's Literary Encyclopedia article on Either/Or