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. He returned to Copenhagen in March 1842 with a draft of the manuscript, which he completed late that year and published in February 1843.
According to a journal entry from 1846, Either/Or was written "lock, stock, and barrel in eleven months" ("Rub og Stub, i 11 Maaneder"),[6][7] although a page from the "Diapsalmata" section in the "A" volume was written earlier.
The title Either/Or affirmed Aristotelian logic, particularly as modified by Johann Gottlieb Fichte[8][9][10] and Immanuel Kant. Is the question, "Who am I?" a scientific question or one for the individual to answer?
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. Kierkegaard saw this as a denial of selfhood and instead advocated the importance of personal responsibility and choice.[11][12][13]
