Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye | "How should we live?"

From the Library of Jay Michael Haft

Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye

Enten-eller: et Livs Fragment. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1843

2 vols, 8vo (190 x 121mm). Half-titles present; very occasional faint spots, otherwise a clean copy. Modern blue half morocco, gilt. Cloth case.

First edition of Kierkegaard's seminal work on ethics and aesthetics in daily life.

Published under the pseudonym Victor Eremita (i.e., the victorious hermit), Enten-eller is “a curious bundle of papers, essays, semi-dialogues and notes, seemingly ill-assorted, but in fact dialectically arranged. As a thinker, Kierkegaard had to wait for the twentieth-century to find his audience; he is now generally considered to be, however eccentric, one of the most important Christian philosophers" (PMM 314).

Søren Kierkegaard took issue with totalizing accounts of human nature, arguing in Enten-eller and elsewhere that science was threatening to become an obstacle to human development. The philosopher believed that in an age rapidly becoming defined by science, imposing seemingly abstract theories of human nature and reality could potentially deny the complexities inherent to each. Faith—which to Kierkegaard was essential to a flourishing human life—is predicated on unknowability, and the scientific advance of the period promised to unveil the mysteries of the universe.