The ethical life view is written as two long letters, with a more argumentative and restrained prose, discussing moral responsibility, critical reflection, and marriage.

The ethical, on the other hand, is the civic realm of existence, where value and identity are judged and at times superseded by the objective world.

After writing and defending his dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), Kierkegaard left Copenhagen in October 1841 to spend the winter in Berlin.

His main purpose was to attend lectures by German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, an eminent figure at the time.

The lectures disappointed many in Schelling's audience, including Mikhail Bakunin and Friedrich Engels, while Kierkegaard described it as "unbearable nonsense".

[5] During his stay, Kierkegaard worked on the manuscript for Either/Or, took daily lessons to perfect his German, and attended operas and plays, particularly by Mozart and Goethe.

[citation needed] The title Either/Or affirmed Aristotelian logic, particularly as modified by Johann Gottlieb Fichte[8][9][10] and Immanuel Kant.

[citation needed] Kierkegaard argues that Hegel's philosophy dehumanized life by denying personal freedom and choice through the neutralization of the "either/or".

The dialectic structure of becoming renders existence far too easy, in Hegel's theory, because conflicts are eventually mediated and disappear through a natural process that requires no individual choice other than a submission to the Will of the Idea or Geist.

The natural reaction is to make an eventual leap to the second phase, the ethical, which is characterized by rational choice and commitment that replace the capricious and inconsistent longings of the aesthetic mode.

This is the real seducer; the aesthetic interest here is also different, namely: how, the method.The next three sections are essay lectures from "A" to the "symparanekromenoi",[23] a club or fellowship of the dead who practice the art of writing posthumous papers.

The second essay, "Shadowgraphs: A Psychological Pastime", discusses modern heroines, including Mozart's Elvira and Goethe's Gretchen (Margaret).

[citation needed] He attends a performance and sees his lover at a play called First Love; for him this is a sign, like a four-leaf clover, that she must be the one.

In this section, "A" explains that, just as a farmer rotates crops to keep the soil fertile, so must a man continue to change in order to remain interesting.

Kierkegaard had this seducer speak again in Stages on Life's Way,[37] where he explored possibilities and then once more where he tried to explain that misunderstanding can be the root of the unity of the tragic and the comic: Anyone who, when he is twenty years old, does not understand that there is a categorical imperative — Enjoy — is a fool, and anyone who does not start doing it is a Christiansfelder.

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847), Hong, p. 186 Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself.

There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us.

[citation needed] Along with this work, Kierkegaard published, under his own name, Two Upbuilding Discourses[44] on May 16, 1843, intended to complement Either/Or, "The Expectancy of Faith" and "Every Good and Every Perfect Gift is from Above".

Søren Kierkegaard, Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 p. 9-12[46]The "Ultimatum" at the end of the second volume of Either/Or hinted at a future discussion of the religious stage in The Two Upbuilding Discourses, "Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it-and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you-for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.

The first two sections revisit and refine the aesthetic and ethical stages elucidated in Either/Or, while the third section, Guilty/Not Guilty is about the religious stage and refers specifically to Goethe's other book, The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, from My Own Life vol 1, 2[48] In addition to the discourses, one week after Either/Or was published, Kierkegaard published a newspaper article in Fædrelandet, titled "Who Is the Author Of Either/Or?

Unrefined immediacy is characterized by immediate cravings for desire and satisfaction through enjoyments that do not require effort or personal cultivation (e.g. alcohol, drugs, casual sex, sloth, etc.)

Kierkegaard's role in all this appears to be that he deliberately sought to disconnect himself from the points of view expressed in his works, although the absurdity of his pseudonyms" bizarre Latin names proves that he did not hope to thoroughly conceal his identity from the reader.

"[66] From a purely literary and historical point of view, Either/Or can be seen as a thinly veiled autobiography of the events between Kierkegaard and his ex-fiancée Regine Olsen.

[49] In 1886, Georg Brandes compared Either/Or with Frederik Paludan-Müller's Kalanus in Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century, which was translated into English at that time.

He wrote the following in Growth of a Soul published posthumously in 1913 about Kierkegaard's Either—Or: "it was valid only for the priests who called themselves Christians and the seducer and Don Juan were the author himself, who satisfied his desires in imagination".

He then states that Kierkegaard's discourses might have led him closer to Christianity but he didn't know if he could come back to something "which had been torn out, and joyfully thrown into the fire".

... Kierkegaard's brilliance seems to me to be showing that while goodness, truth, and beauty can not speculatively be derived one from another, yet these three are integrally related in the dynamics of a healthy character structure".

Does the Christian faith do justice, for instance, to the fact that increasing freedom has set the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," in a larger frame of reference than ever before in history?

[84]Johannes Edouard Hohlenberg wrote a biography about Søren Kierkegaard in 1954 and in that book he speculated that the Diary of the Seducer was meant to depict the life of P.L.

[89] Many authors were interested in separating the esthetic, the ethical and the religious but it may have been, as far as Kierkegaard was concerned, of more importance for the single individual to have a way to decide when one was becoming dominant over the other two.