By 
Either/Or is a highly influential book that contrasts two different ways of living life: aesthetics and ethics. The aesthetic life is one of passion, desire and whim, while ethics is more inclined towards discipline and order. It was written by Soren Kierkegaard, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 19th century. His work was originally ignored and obscure, mostly rejected by the Danish Church, however it became increasingly popular at the turn of the century and has significantly influenced a number of leading philosophers ever since. It is cited as a foundational work in the discipline of existentialism, which is a broad category of works that emphasize the concepts of free will and subjectivity; it is basically a treatise that addresses the question: ‘How should we live our lives?’
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides a deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when sighs and moans pass through them they sound like beautiful music”
The first half of the book is the writings of ‘A’, a man who lives his life in the aesthetic phase. He is a very impulsive, capricious and fanciful person who laments the dull and prosaic nature of life; and his response to this is to lead a spontaneous and highly inconsistent life to combat the unhappy effects of boredom. The main goal of this man is to pursue sensory pleasures for himself, and therefore his actions are very selfish, disregarding the concerns and interests of those around him. The structure of this section is written to reflect the nature of the author’s mind: it is highly poetic and idyllic, or, for lack of a better word, aesthetic. This section contains the famous ‘Seducer’s Diary’, which tells the story of a man who plays with the love life of a young woman simply for fun. The second section is written by a ‘Judge Wilhelm’ and contains Kierkegaard’s idea of an ethical phase of life. This section makes the claim that a consistent and stable existence is far more happiness-inducing, since the polarized emotional existence of the aesthetic phase is too uncertain and will eventually lead to emotional ruin. Contrast the benefits between the life of a married man and that of a seducer: the married man always has something to look forward to, while the seducer always looks back, remembering past conquests and constantly looking for new ones.
How absurd are men! They never use the freedoms they have, they demand the ones they don’t have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of expression.
However, what we see in the end is that the two stages of life are inextricably linked and that it is impossible to live your life according to only one stage. This is evident from the very fact that Judge Wilhelm advocates ethical living, as she is more inducing of aesthetic pleasures, and the very fact that A is trying to instruct the reader shows that she has ethical concerns. What is posited as a separate sphere of life is the religious phase of life, which is treated in much more detail in Kierkegaard’s other works, but is still substantially addressed here. Either one is an extremely deep read: the kind of book where you have to read and reread sections to understand their full meaning.
I feel like I’m a piece in a game of chess when my opponent says: That piece can’t be moved.