Choosing Either/Or

 

It is now sufficiently clear that reflective love constantly consumes itself and stops quite arbitrarily now here, now there; it is clear that it points beyond itself to something higher, but the question is whether the higher cannot straightaway combine with first love. Now, this higher something is the religious, where rational reflection ends, and just as for God everything is possible, so neither for the religious individual is anything impossible.

- Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard

Many philosophers and thinkers have asked the toughest question in created ways. Questions such as why are we here? What is our purpose? To these questions we have all perhaps tossed out our own answers, or tossed out the questions altogether. Too difficult to answer. Just go on living how we choose. Yet, everything we choose is a direction either toward ourselves (our own desires) or toward something bigger (the ethical and good).

I am reading Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, a not-so-usual book of two parts, written by pseudonyms. Part I is from the point of view of the aesthetic/hedonistic/sensual lifestyle. Everything is subjective and according to what he feels and experiences. He praises idleness and pleasure. Part II is from the opposing viewpoint. Judge Vilhelm taking stances against these lifestyle choices and voices his case from the side of ethics and accepting responsibility. Kierkegaard forces his readers to decide for themselves which viewpoint either that, or that, as the most life-affirming. Kierkegaard might conclude that we (most of us) find ourselves on the side of the aesthete in Part I.

For the aesthete asks what we all might ask, "What is the human race? Either the sadness of the tragic, or the profound sorrow and profound joy of religion. Or is that not the peculiarity of everything that emanates from that happy people - a melancholy, a sadness, in its art, in its poetry, in its life, in its joy?"

Just as in life, we are not given answers. The reader must confront such questions and choose their reasons for agreeing with a choice of oneself, or the choice of obliging the familial and social responsibilities. This sub-created conversation between two opposing views allows the reader to engage in a deeper way with these fictional characters as we grapple with the meaning of why we choose a certain way of life.

We choose from an either/or set before us almost everyday, so which side do we find ourselves on?

What is it, then, that I separate in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I simply want to bring you to the point where that choice truly requires meaning for you. It is on this that everything hinges. Only when one can get a person to stand at the crossroads in such a way that he has no expedient but to choose, does he choose what is right.