The first part describes the "aesthetic" phase of existence. It contains a collection of papers, notionally found by "Victor Eremita" and written by "A", the aesthete.[5][12]
The aesthete, according to Kierkegaard, eventually falls into despair, a psychological state (explored further in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death) that results from a recognition of the limits of the aesthetic approach to life. Kierkegaard's "despair" is a somewhat analogous precursor of existential angst. 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.
Diapsalmata
The first section of Part I is a collection of tangential aphorisms, epigrams, anecdotes, and musings on the aesthetic mode. The word "diapsalmata" is related to "psalms", and means "refrains". It contains some of Kierkegaard's best-known and poetic lines, such as "What is a poet?", "Freedom of Speech" vs. "Freedom of Thought", the "Unmovable chess piece", the tragic clown, and the laughter of the gods.[18]
Reading these as written shows a constant movement from the outer poetic experience to the inner experience of humor. The movement from the outer to the inner is a theme in Kierkegaard's works.
Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic
Don Giovanni confronts the stone guest in a painting by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, ca 1830–35 (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg)[19]This essay discusses the idea that music expresses sensuality. "A" evaluates Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, as well as Goethe's Faust. "A" accepts the task of proving, through the works of Mozart, that "music is a higher, or more spiritual art, than language". During this process, he offers three stages of the musical-erotic.[20]
He distinguishes a seducer such as Don Juan, who falls under aesthetic categories, and Faust, who falls under ethical categories. "The musical Don Juan enjoys the satisfaction of desire; the reflective Don Juan enjoys the deception, enjoys the cunning." Don Juan is split between the esthetic and the ethical. He becomes lost in the multiplicity of the "1,003 women he has to seduce" (as in the famous aria "Madamina, il catalogo è questo"),[21][22] Faust seduces just one woman.
This section deals with theological questions. "A" asks if God seduces 1,003 people at one time or if he seduces one individual at a time in order to make a believer. He writes:
Achim v. Arnim tells somewhere of a seducer of a very different style, a seducer who falls under ethical categories. About him he uses an expression which in truth, boldness, and conciseness is almost equal to Mozart’s stroke of the bow. He says he could so talk with a woman that, if the devil caught him, he could wheedle himself out of it if he had a chance to talk with the devil’s grandmother. This is the real seducer; the aesthetic interest here is also different, namely: how, the method.
Essays read before the Symparanekromenoi
Antigone in front of the dead Polynices, painting by Nikiphoros Lytras (1865), National Gallery, Athens, Greece.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 first essay, which discusses ancient and modern tragedy, is the "Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern". He writes about tragedy's inner and outer aspects. Can remorse be shown on a stage? What about sorrow and pain? Which is easier to portray?[24] He also discusses guilt, sin, fear, compassion, and responsibility in what can be considered a foreshadowing of Fear and Trembling and Repetition.[25] He then writes a modern interpretation of Antigone that presages The Concept of Anxiety.
The second essay, "Shadowgraphs: A Psychological Pastime", discusses modern heroines, including Mozart's Elvira and Goethe's Gretchen (Margaret). He studies how desire can come to grief. He asks whether love can be deceived.[26]
He is asking whether one person can reveal the inner life of a historical figure. Psychologically he is asking whether psychologists can give an accurate account of the inner world. Religiously he's asking whether one person can accurately perceive the inner world of another. He conducts several thought experiments to attempt this.
The third essay, called "The Unhappiest One", discusses the hypothetical question: "who deserves the distinction of being unhappier than everyone else?" Kierkegaard has expanded his search for the highest[27] to a search for the lowest.[28] He wants to find the unhappy person by looking to the past. Is it Niobe, Job, the father of the prodigal son, or Periander,[29] Abraham or Christ?
Ultimately, for Kierkegaard, the aesthetical and the ethical are both superseded by a final phase which he terms the "religious" mode. This is introduced later in Fear and Trembling.
The First Love
In this volume Kierkegaard examines the concept of "First Love" as a pinnacle for the aesthete, using his concepts of "closedness" (indesluttethed in Danish) and "demonic" (demoniske) with reference to Eugène Scribe. Scribe wanted to create a template for all playwrights. He insisted that people value plays to escape reality and not for instruction.[30] Kierkegaard rejected any template in the field of literature or of Christianity. He was against systematizing literature, because the system forces the artist to settle down within the system.
He wrote about the muse as the occasion for inspiration. He considers how much of the muse's calling depends on the muse, how much on the individual, and how much on will/volition.[31] Later in Concluding Unscientific Poscript he wrote; "inspiration is indeed an object of faith, is qualitatively dialectical, not attainable by means of quantification."[32]
Kierkegaard attacks reading about love instead of discovering love. Scribe's play is 16 pages long[33] leading Kierkegaard to write a 50-page review. He attacked the practice of reading reviews instead of the subject books.
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. Confusion sets in for her because of mistaken identity. She is unable to make up her mind about love and says, "The first love is the true love, and one loves only once." Kierkegaard rejects this as sophistry, "because the category first, is at the same time a qualitative and a numerical category."[34]
Crop Rotation: An Attempt at a Theory of Social Prudence
To Kierkegaard's aesthete, boredom is the root of all evil, and must be avoided. 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. "A" speaks out against anything that may prevent this rotation and lock one into boredom, including friends, family, and most importantly for the second half of the book, marriage.
Boredom rests upon the nothing that interlaces existence; its dizziness is infinite, like that which comes from looking into a bottomless abyss. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part 1 Rotation of Crops 1843 Hong p. 291
Diary of a Seducer
Written by "Johannes the Seducer", this volume illustrates how the aesthete holds the "interesting" as his highest value and that to satisfy his voyeuristic reflections, he manipulates the girl Cordelia into becoming interesting – he seduces her, but then schemes to have her question the idea of engagement. Finally, Johannes succeeds in having Cordelia break the engagement. He uses irony, artifice, caprice, imagination and arbitrariness to engineer poetically satisfying possibilities; he is not so much interested in the act of seduction as in willfully creating its interesting possibility.
The Seducer is reminiscent of Faust Part 1, Scene VII (A Street). Faust says to Mephistopheles, "Listen, you must get that girl for me!" Mephistopheles says she's an "innocent" girl, but Faust says she's "older than 14". Mephistopheles says he's "speaking like some Don Juan". Faust then calls the devil a Master Moraliser.[35] But Goethe may have been responding to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1616); Goethe and Marlowe have devils and angels as third person or persons between him and his love, but Kierkegaard has a different third person involved in the discussions between Johannes the Seducer and Cordelia. He has this power called chance.[36] The Seducer knows the value of chance and wants to use chance to be "a possibility which seems an impossibility".
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. .... Our young friend will always remain on the outside. Victor[38] is a fanatic; Constantin has paid too much for his intellect; the Fashion Designer is a madman. All four of you after the same girl will turn out to be a fizzle! Have enough fanaticism to idealize, enough appetite to join in the jolly conviviality of desire, enough understanding to break off in exactly the same way death breaks off, enough rage to want to enjoy it all over again — then one is the favorite of the gods and of the girls."[39]
Kierkegaard explores the category of choice and the aesthetic as well as the ethical. Both can choose to love each other but the "how" of love is Kierkegaard's subject.
