From EITHER/OR, PART I (1843)
On opening "fortune's door."
“Alas, fortune’s door (Lykkens Dør) does not open inward so that one can push it open by rushing at it; but it opens outward, and therefore one can do nothing about it.”
When Either/Or was published on February 20, 1843, it announced a new sensation in Danish letters. A major part of the book’s appeal lies in its philosophical polyphony: a number of characters, each suggesting a different life-view (Livs-Anskuelse), turn up in Either/Or’s pages, including a mysterious editor, a melancholy poet, a conniving Lothario, a bourgeois civil servant, and a jolly parson. The passage cited above is attributed to the poet known as “A,” and it nicely sums up the exhilarating terror of what Kierkegaard termed “the aesthetic”—an existential sphere in which one chiefly pursues sensual or psychical self-gratification. For Kierkegaard, the danger of the aesthetic is precisely that it situates happiness outside of the self: the aesthete lacks self-determination, insofar as she requires external good fortune to be happy. The result is a profoundly discontinuous existence, in which life is nothing more than a series of evanescent moments, of doors opening and closing at random.