KIERKEGAARD (Søren).
Either/Or. A Fragment of Life.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or in his late twenties, ‘under a variety of pseudonyms (all recognisable), the chief advantage of this method seems to have been to give Kierkegaard the opportunity of letting different sides of his mind converse as individuals with each other, in a semi-Socratic fashion. Without disclosing his real beliefs, he confronted his readers with a choice of different possibilities …. Choice, as the title of his work suggests, was at the root of Kierkegaard’s theory. There can be no system of existence, only a system of ideas. From this he develops his theory of ‘Existence’ (since taken up by the modern Existentialists), in which human beings considered as subjects not objects are the only real existence: their reflective as opposed to active nature being focused on the ‘acts’ of making perpetual decisions’ (PMM).
The work was originally published in Denmark in 1843 under the title Enten-Eller, a centenary before its first English translation. The present UK edition uses the sheets of the first US edition of the same year with a cancel title page. The UK edition is significantly scarcer than the American edition, having been produced to War Economy Standards with ‘Economy’ dust jackets printed on the blank verso of recycled Oxford University Press jackets - the present example is printed on the verso of dust jackets of James T. Shortwell’s (ed.) Economic and Social History of the World War.
