I

In Either/Or Kierkegaard has his aesthete A say this about the modern age: “It is conceited enough to disdain the tears of tragedy, but it is also conceited enough to want to do without mercy. And what, after all, is human life, the human race, when these two things are taken away?” A’s rhetorical question presents us with an either/or quite different from that referred to by that work’s title: if the two volumes of Either/Or appear to present the reader with a choice between two modern life-styles, the self-centered, aesthetic life, shadowed by despair, represented by the aesthete A, and the ethical life represented by the rather self-satisfied Judge William, in the course of the two volumes Kierkegaard exhibits the insufficiency of both. Volume 1 thus presents us with an immanent critique of the aesthetic life, not so very different from the life with which the young Kierkegaard himself experimented for a while and exemplified for him by Friedrich Schlegel, whom, following Hegel, he had already subjected to a devastating critique in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony. Supporting his argument from his own experience, he shows that any attempt to make the solitary self the foundation of meaning must end in despair. Meaning must originate in the other.

How different the life of Judge William appears to be. Happy in the circle of his family, content to live the kind of life one is expected to live as a responsible member of society, the author of the two long letters that seek to recall his young friend to the ethical, letters that make up the bulk of the second volume, seems to have found himself. But with this description of the ethical life Kierkegaard provided no alternative that either he or his aesthete could make his own. Even if the young Kierkegaard may briefly have hoped for just such a life with Regine Olsen, his own life experiences called the authenticity of such a life into question. He knew that in this sense he would never feel at home in his world. Thus even as Kierkegaard recognized that the aesthetic life must end in despair, spiritually he was much closer to the young Schlegel than to Hegel, who was too willing to sacrifice the individual to the progress of reason and to find meaning in that sacrifice to his absolute.