Either/Or (Kierkegaard book)

• 1. Introduction

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  Either/Or arrived in Copenhagen bookshops in February 1843 as two volumes attributed not to any living person but to a fictional editor named Victor Eremita, Latin for "victorious hermit". The real author, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, had spent the previous winter in Berlin, attending lectures by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling that he found so disappointing he described them as "unbearable nonsense". He had come home in March 1842 with a manuscript draft, and completed the book by the end of that year. What emerged was not a straightforward philosophical treatise but a layered performance involving four separate fictional voices, each embodying a different way of living.

  At its center sits a question borrowed from Aristotle: how should we live? Kierkegaard's motto for the book comes from Plutarch: "The deceived is wiser than one not deceived." What that deceptively simple phrase opens onto is a debate between two modes of existence, the aesthetic and the ethical, staged through contrasting prose styles, fictional love affairs, essays on music and tragedy, and a pair of long letters from a judge to a young aesthete. The questions planted here would consume most of Kierkegaard's publishing career.

• 2. The Aesthete's World

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  "A", the fictional author of Part I, never receives a proper name from his supposed editor Victor Eremita. Eremita claims he found a collection of papers inside an antique escritoire and does not know who wrote them. The papers open with a section called "Diapsalmata", a word related to psalms that means "refrains", collecting aphorisms, epigrams, and musings on the aesthetic mode. Kierkegaard's best-known poetic lines appear here, including meditations on the poet, on freedom of speech versus freedom of thought, and on the figure of the tragic clown.

  A key essay in Part I, titled "Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic", works through the claim that music expresses sensuality in a way language cannot. "A" evaluates Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni alongside Goethe's Faust, and sets himself the task of proving that music is a higher, more spiritual art than language. In this framework, Don Juan embodies the aesthetic seducer who loses himself in the multiplicity of what the famous aria calls "the 1,003 women he has to seduce", while Faust seduces just one woman and falls under ethical categories.

  Boredom, in "A"'s worldview, is the root of all evil. The essay "Crop Rotation" argues that just as a farmer rotates crops to keep soil fertile, a person must keep changing to remain interesting. "A" warns against anything that locks one into routine, naming friends, family, and especially marriage as potential traps. The theory oscillates between unrefined immediacy, craving raw satisfaction, and refined immediacy, carefully cultivating pleasures for maximum effect. Neither version, Kierkegaard suggests, asks the aesthete to take responsibility for the shape of their own life.

  The section called "The Diary of a Seducer", attributed to a character named Johannes, shows the aesthetic mode pushed to its extreme. Johannes maneuvers a young woman named Cordelia into breaking off their engagement rather than allowing him to do it, engineering an outcome he finds poetically satisfying. What Johannes wants is not the act of seduction but the interesting possibility it creates. Kierkegaard later placed the Seducer figure in Stages on Life's Way, where Johannes speaks again.

• 3. The Judge's Letters

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  Part II shifts register entirely. Judge Vilhelm, also called Wilhelm or William, writes two long letters to "A" attempting to make the case that ethical life does not require abandoning aesthetic pleasure. The difference, the Judge argues, is that the pursuit of pleasure must be tempered by responsibility and commitment. Where "A"'s writing runs to poetic imagery and short forms, the Judge's prose is argumentative and restrained.

  The first letter, "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage", defends marriage as compatible with genuine feeling rather than hostile to it. The second, "Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality", addresses the value of making binding life-choices, specifically choosing the good or choosing oneself. Kierkegaard stresses what he calls the "eternal" nature of marriage and writes that "something new comes into existence" through the wedding ceremony. The aesthete, by contrast, can only manage what he calls a "half hour's resolution".

  The volume closes with a brief text called "Ultimatum", framed as a discourse on the thought that against God, every person is always in the wrong. The Judge's spiritual advice is that "A" and "B" make peace with each other. Kierkegaard quotes from the Gospel of Luke and from Sennacherib's prism. The conclusion points beyond the ethical stage toward something the letters cannot fully articulate, a religious dimension that the Judge's rational framework leaves unresolved.

• 4. Pseudonyms and Their Purpose

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  Either/Or was the first of Kierkegaard's works written pseudonymously, a practice he sustained through the first half of his career. Four pseudonyms operate in this single book: Victor Eremita as compiler and editor, "A" as the aesthete of Part I, Judge Vilhelm as the author of the letters in Part II, and Johannes as the author of the Seducer's Diary, with Cordelia as his lover. Kierkegaard deliberately sought, as he later explained, to disconnect himself from the viewpoints expressed. Yet the pseudonyms carry deliberately absurd Latin names, which suggests he did not seriously expect to hide his identity.

  One week after publication, Kierkegaard published a newspaper article in Fædrelandet titled "Who Is the Author of Either/Or?", writing under the pseudonym "A.F." The article argued that most readers, including its own supposed author, thought it not worth the trouble to worry about who wrote the book, preferring to engage with the text alone. He discussed his authorial strategy again in the 1848 and 1859 book The Point of View of My Work as an Author, explaining that the moment had come to declare plainly what he was as an author.

  According to a journal entry from 1846, Either/Or was written "lock, stock, and barrel in eleven months", though one page from the "Diapsalmata" section dated from an earlier period. This compressed timeline, written largely while Kierkegaard was attending operas and plays in Berlin and taking daily lessons to improve his German, adds to the sense of the book as an act of sustained creative invention rather than slow philosophical construction.

• 5. Kierkegaard Against Hegel

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  The philosophical target lurking behind Either/Or is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Kierkegaard argued that Hegel's philosophy dehumanized life by dissolving the genuine either/or into a dialectical process. In Hegel's framework, conflicts are eventually mediated and disappear through a natural movement that requires no individual choice beyond submission to the Will of the Idea, or Geist. Kierkegaard read this as a denial of selfhood, insisting instead on personal responsibility and the irreducible weight of individual choice.

  The title itself affirmed what Kierkegaard saw as Aristotelian logic, particularly as developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Immanuel Kant. Against Hegel's mediation, the book insists that some choices cannot be absorbed into a higher synthesis. Is the question "Who am I?" a scientific question or one that only the individual can answer? Kierkegaard's answer drives the entire structure of the work.

  His response to Hegel extended to his literary model as well. Kierkegaard was a close reader of both Goethe and Hegel, each of whom, he felt, presented a way of living. The aesthetic strand of Either/Or draws heavily on Goethe's Faust and on Mozart's operas, while the ethical strand engages Hegelian categories in order to push beyond them. The prominent Hegelian Johan Ludvig Heiberg criticized Part I on publication, then offered a more favorable reading of Part II. Kierkegaard replied in the newspaper as Victor Eremita, accusing Heiberg of failing to read the preface.

• 6. Biographical Shadows

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  Readers and scholars have long noticed that the Diary of a Seducer maps closely onto events in Kierkegaard's own life. He befriended the family of a woman named Regine Olsen, asked her to marry him, and then broke off the engagement. Johannes the Seducer does precisely this to Cordelia in the diary, befriending her family, proposing, and then engineering the dissolution of the engagement. Either/Or can be read, from this angle, as a poetic examination of Kierkegaard's own choice between a life of sensual pleasure and the possibility of marriage.

  Kierkegaard was also concerned about Regine because she had a habit of identifying with characters she saw in Shakespeare plays at the theater. On one day she would behave as Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing, on another as Juliet. The book's engagement with performed identity and aesthetic self-fashioning carries a personal charge that the pseudonymous structure simultaneously conceals and advertises.

  Johannes Edouard Hohlenberg, writing a biography of Kierkegaard in 1954, speculated that the Diary of the Seducer was also meant to depict the life of P.L. Moller, who in 1845 wrote articles in The Corsair damaging to Kierkegaard's reputation. John Updike described the Diary as "an intricate curiosity, a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast."

• 7. Influence and Reception

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  Henriette Wulff described the book to Hans Christian Andersen in a letter shortly after publication, noting that the first part was full of "Don Juanism, skepticism, et cetera" while the second was more conciliating, ending in a sermon said to be excellent. It attracted wide attention, though public critical discussion lagged behind private circulation.

  Despite its February 1843 publication, Either/Or was one of the last of Kierkegaard's books to be translated into English, not appearing in translation until 1944. David F. Swenson, a professor at the University of Minnesota, had introduced three lectures on Kierkegaard's three modes of life back in 1918, helping to build English-language interest before a full translation existed. Miguel de Unamuno published his 1914 novel Mist in direct response to reading the Diary of a Seducer.

  August Strindberg wrote in Growth of a Soul, published posthumously in 1913, that Either/Or made him a champion of the ethical over the aesthetic and that after reading it he "felt sinful". In 1886, Georg Brandes compared Either/Or with Frederik Paludan-Muller's Kalanus in his study of eminent nineteenth-century authors. Later, in 1906, Brandes compared the Diary of the Seducer with Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

  The book received a significant second life in contemporary philosophy with the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981, which situated Either/Or as an attempt to continue the Enlightenment project set forward by Hume and Kant. MacIntyre's reading generated a body of responses collected under the title Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. The 1997 Elliott Smith album Either/Or takes its name from Kierkegaard's book, reflecting Smith's study of philosophy at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and Elif Batuman's novel Either/Or also borrows the title while engaging directly with Kierkegaard's themes.