Summary: Either/Or (page 4)

Certainly, one may do certain things out of caprice; but the one thing that truly gives life its importance will escape you: you may gain the whole world, and yet lose yourself. ¹

We can now see why the crucial point is not choosing this or that particular thing—this or that action with this or that consequence. The true choice, the one that conditions all the others, is the choice each person must make in conscience, with no possibility of escape, no possibility of flight: between two modes of existence, two conceptions of life from which everything will follow—and in particular the very possibility of choice itself: One must therefore live either aesthetically, or ethically.

Strictly speaking, we cannot say that the aesthetic life is the result of a choice: He who lives aesthetically does not choose. The aesthete is rather the one who flees choice and the seriousness it demands; his life is the result of flight—into caprice, pleasure, and bad faith.

For this reason, it is enough to face choice with courage and seriousness in order to choose the ethical:

If only one can bring a man to the crossroads in such a way that there is no other way out for him than to choose, then he will choose rightly.

Ethics is precisely the element that makes a choice a choice: only here do we stop swinging from one fleeting desire to another, letting ourselves be carried along by life's various accidents; only here do we find something like a will.

It is less a matter of choosing between these two propositions—"to will the good or to will the evil"—than of choosing "to will"; but by that, good and evil are posited on their respective sides.

And he adds: What matters is not so much reflection as this baptism of the will.

One must therefore have the courage to expose oneself to this dilemma between the two kinds of existence—and the sooner the better. It is dangerous to postpone the moment, since the more time goes by, the more difficult the choice becomes; for the soul is continually in one side of the dilemma, and it therefore becomes increasingly hard to break free.

Might there be another solution? Could we imagine something that would allow us to escape the dilemma—a solution that reconciles the two kinds of existence, for instance, a synthesis that takes the best of both?

No—and this is Kierkegaard's opportunity to attack the Hegelian notion of synthesis, or mediation.

Hegel is not named, but it is he whom Kierkegaard has implicitly in view. It is in this work that we find the first critique of Hegel, though it will be developed in other books—Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and so on—until it reaches its peak in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Hegel gradually becomes an obsession for Kierkegaard, who will eventually turn on him with a fierce irony, a vehemence unusual in philosophical writing—going so far as to use ad hominem arguments.

Hegel, as we know, offers a philosophy built on the notion of synthesis (Aufhebung, a German term meaning both 'to overcome' and 'to preserve'). In brief: through synthesis, through Hegelian mediation, two contraries—two opposed moments—are reconciled in a third moment that gathers and surpasses them—often summarised, somewhat crudely, as: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

It is dialectic—the introduction of movement into logic—that allows consciousness to traverse different stages, from immediate sense-certainty to absolute knowing, as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

This is, for Hegel, a universal principle: everything is caught up in a dialectical process that brings it into confrontation with its opposite and carries it beyond itself towards a third term. It is a necessary process within History—hence a kind of determinism from which there is no escape.

But if there is synthesis or reconciliation for everything, then there is no dilemma—no choice in Kierkegaard's sense of the term. One would not have to choose between two kinds of existence, ethical or aesthetic, because the truth of this dilemma would in fact be its overcoming in a third form of existence that united the other two.

Are the ethical and the aesthetic the thesis and antithesis that ought to be harmoniously surpassed in a reconciling synthesis, erasing the tragic character of choice?

Hegelian dialectic abolishes the Kierkegaardian dilemma—and that is precisely what Kierkegaard refuses. For him, this is an absolute choice that on the contrary blows apart Hegel's beautifully oiled mechanism: dialectic itself.

Kierkegaard knows it: he must undertake a rigorous critique of Hegelian dialectic in order to establish the philosophical legitimacy of his position, and that is the task he now sets himself.

In one sense, he faces the same problem as Kant when Kant tries to reconcile the determinism that can be observed in History with the freedom that must exist in the individual if morality is to have any meaning. Kant resolves this apparent contradiction by distinguishing between the realm of phenomena and that of noumena, or things in themselves. The two theories are thus compatible: determinism characterises the level of phenomena, freedom the level of noumena.

In the same way, Kierkegaard reconciles the apparent Hegelian dialectical determinism we can observe in History with his notion of an absolute free choice without mediation, by showing that there are two different levels of explanation. Both doctrines are true: it all depends on the standpoint one adopts.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading