Either/Or

Summary

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life appeared in Copenhagen on 20 February 1843 in two volumes, signed by no author. Its 'editor', Victor Eremita, explains in a preface that he found the papers in a secret drawer of an old writing desk bought from a second-hand dealer, which sprang open only when he struck it with a hatchet. The papers come from two hands. Victor calls the first author simply A, a young man of refined taste and no settled occupation; the second, B, is a magistrate named William whose long letters are addressed to A. Victor declines to say which view is right, and Kierkegaard keeps his own name out of the book. Volume One gives A's papers. It opens with the Diapsalmata, a sequence of aphorisms full of wit, boredom and melancholy. A long essay on the 'immediate erotic stages' argues that Mozart's Don Giovanni is the perfect classic because music alone can express sensuous desire, and traces three stages through Cherubino, Papageno and Don Giovanni himself. Further essays, read to an imagined society of the dead, the Symparanekromenoi, compare ancient and modern tragedy through a reimagined Antigone, sketch three abandoned women (Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira and Goethe's Margarete), seek 'the unhappiest one', and review a Scribe comedy. 'Rotation of Crops' offers a mock-serious method for escaping boredom by arbitrariness, forgetting and the avoidance of friendship, marriage and official posts. The volume ends with 'The Seducer's Diary', which A claims to have found: the record of Johannes, who coldly engineers a young woman's engagement and its breaking for the sake of the experience. Volume Two answers. In 'The Esthetic Validity of Marriage' William argues that marriage does not kill first love but preserves and deepens it in time. 'The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality' urges A to choose himself in earnest, to accept his concrete history with repentance, and to see that refusing to choose is itself despair. The book closes with an 'Ultimatum': a sermon by a Jutland pastor, forwarded by William, on the upbuilding thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong. Kierkegaard wrote much of the book in Berlin in the winter of 1841–42, soon after the broken engagement, and the question of what a vow means runs through both volumes. Victor's preface invites the reader to make the decision the book will not make for him. Content note: the Seducer's Diary depicts deliberate emotional manipulation without explicit scenes; teachers should excerpt it with care.

Plot or Argument

• Victor Eremita's preface: the hatchet and the desk

  The pseudonymous editor tells how he discovered the papers, sorts them into A's and B's, and refuses to settle which life-view wins, leaving the decision with the reader.

• Diapsalmata and the musical-erotic

  A's aphorisms establish a mood of ironic melancholy. His essay on Mozart's Don Giovanni treats sensuous immediacy as something only music can express and Don Giovanni as its classic embodiment.

• Papers for the fellowship of the dead

  Addresses to the Symparanekromenoi on ancient and modern tragedy (a modern Antigone who carries a hidden secret), on reflective grief in three abandoned heroines, and on 'the unhappiest one', who lives only in hope or memory and never in the present.

• Rotation of Crops

  A's tongue-in-cheek theory of social prudence: boredom is the root of evil, so one must cultivate arbitrariness, forget at will, and avoid binding commitments such as marriage, friendship and official employment.

• The Seducer's Diary

  Johannes records his calculated pursuit of Cordelia: arranging to become her fiancé, then manoeuvring her into breaking the engagement, so that the seduction is an aesthetic artwork with a human being as its material.

• Judge William on marriage

  B argues that marital love keeps the immediacy of first love while giving it history, so that the vow is not the death of romance but its fulfilment in time.

• The balance of aesthetic and ethical

  B's second letter calls A to choose himself, warns that despair underlies a life lived in moods, analyses melancholy, and presents the ethical person as one who receives his concrete self, including vocation and duties, as a task.

• Ultimatum: a Jutland pastor's sermon

  A closing sermon on Luke 19 and the thought that before God we are always in the wrong points beyond William's ethical confidence toward a religious stance the later pseudonyms develop.

Characters

• Victor Eremita, pseudonymous editor

  'Victorious hermit' who finds the papers in a writing desk, names their authors A and B, and frames the book without judging between them.

• A, aesthete, author of Volume One

  Gifted, ironic and bored young man whose essays and aphorisms make the case for a life of interesting moods and avoided commitments.

• Judge William (B), ethicist, author of Volume Two

  Married magistrate and older friend of A who writes long, warm, sometimes ponderous letters defending marriage, vocation and the choice of oneself.

• Johannes the Seducer, diarist in Volume One

  Author of the diary A claims to have found; a calculating aesthete who treats a young woman's love as material for his own reflective enjoyment.

• Cordelia Wahl, object of the seduction

  Young woman whom Johannes courts, becomes engaged to, and then leads to break the engagement; her letters appear at the start of the diary.

• The pastor from Jutland, author of the Ultimatum

  Country clergyman, a friend of William, whose sermon on always being in the wrong before God closes the book.

Lessons

• Not choosing is a choice

  Judge William's central claim is that A's refusal to commit is not neutrality but a decision to let moods govern him, and that this hovering ends in despair. The book stages the argument without a narrator's verdict so that the reader, too, must decide.

  • What specific commitments does 'Rotation of Crops' advise avoiding, and why?
  • William says the aesthete's life is already despair. Is this fair to A's wit and intelligence?
  • Why might Kierkegaard have left the book without an authorial conclusion?

• Seduction as a counterfeit art

  The Seducer's Diary shows aesthetic refinement turned against a person. Johannes treats Cordelia as material for an experience he designs, and the cruelty lies in his calculation, not in passion. Students should notice how A himself shudders at the diary he presents.

  • How does Johannes differ from Mozart's Don Giovanni as A describes him?
  • What does the diary suggest about using other people as means to one's own enjoyment?
  • Why does Kierkegaard place this diary at the end of Volume One rather than the beginning?

• Marriage gives first love a history

  William argues against the romantic assumption that love dies when it becomes duty. Marriage, for him, takes the immediacy of first love into time and makes it a shared life. His case can be weighed alongside Scripture's account of covenant faithfulness.

  • What does William mean by saying that marital love has its enemy in time but its victory in time as well?
  • Does William treat duty as the enemy or the friend of love?
  • How does the broken engagement in Kierkegaard's own life complicate reading William as his spokesman?

• Masks, voices and honest citation

  Kierkegaard wrote through pseudonyms and later asked readers not to attribute their words to him. Reading Either/Or well means citing A, William or Victor Eremita by name and asking what each voice can see that the others cannot.

  • What is lost if every sentence in the book is reported as 'Kierkegaard says'?
  • Which voice in the book seems most self-aware, and how can you tell?
  • Does the Jutland pastor's sermon speak with more authority than William's letters, or simply differently?

Context

Either/Or belongs to the Danish Golden Age, when Copenhagen was a small capital with a lively theatre, a Hegelian movement in philosophy and theology led by J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen, and a Lutheran state church under Bishop J. P. Mynster. Kierkegaard had written his dissertation on irony (1841) and heard Schelling lecture in Berlin in 1841–42. The book's title answers the Hegelian habit of 'mediating' opposites into a higher unity: Kierkegaard insists that some alternatives must simply be chosen between.

Composition

Kierkegaard broke his engagement to Regine Olsen in October 1841, left for Berlin, and wrote much of the book there over the following months, completing it in Copenhagen. It was published by C. A. Reitzel on 20 February 1843. Its success was immediate in Copenhagen literary circles, and readers speculated about the author. Kierkegaard acknowledged the pseudonymous works in 'A First and Last Explanation' appended to Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846).

Reception

English readers first met the book in the 1944 Princeton translation by David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong's complete translation (1987) in Kierkegaard's Writings became the scholarly standard; Alastair Hannay's abridged translation (1992) is widely used in classrooms. Twentieth-century existentialists drew heavily on the book's idea of choosing oneself, while Christian readers have stressed the closing sermon and the way the later pseudonymous works place both aesthetic and ethical stances beneath a religious one.

Comparisons

• Fear and Trembling

  Published eight months later, Fear and Trembling takes Judge William's ethical universal as its starting point and asks whether Abraham's faith suspends it; the aesthete's secret-keeping in Either/Or returns there as the problem of concealment.

• The Sickness Unto Death

  William's claim that a life of moods is despair is analysed systematically by Anti-Climacus in 1849, who defines despair as a misrelation of the self and locates its cure in resting transparently in God, a step beyond William's ethical self-choice.

• The School for Wives, The Critique of The School for Wives and Don Juan

  A's essay on the musical-erotic ranks Mozart's Don Giovanni above literary versions of the legend, including Molière's, arguing that a spoken Don Juan becomes reflective and comic while only music can present desire in its immediacy.

• Faust, Part One

  Goethe's Margarete is one of A's three 'silhouettes' of reflective grief, and the seducer's cold intellect in Either/Or invites comparison with the Faust who abandons Gretchen while pursuing experience.

• Philosophy of Right

  Hegel treats marriage as an ethical bond within the family and state; Judge William's defence of marriage sounds partly Hegelian, while the book's title rejects Hegel's method of reconciling opposites in a higher synthesis.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Victor Eremita's preface: how the papers were found and why he refuses to judge between A and B.
• In the Diapsalmata, the tone A takes toward his own sadness. Is he suffering, performing, or both?
• The method in 'Rotation of Crops' for defeating boredom, and the commitments it warns against.
• A's own preface to the Seducer's Diary, where he says he is frightened by what he presents. Content note: deliberate emotional manipulation; use guided excerpts.
• Judge William's warmth toward A: he writes as a friend trying to win him, not as a judge passing sentence. Then note the Jutland pastor's closing sermon, and how its claim that we are always in the wrong before God unsettles William's confidence.

Key terms and names

Either/Or (Enten–Eller)

Kierkegaard's title phrase for a decision between two ways of life that cannot be blended into a higher compromise.

Aesthetic life

In this book, a life organised around mood, interest and enjoyment, including refined intellectual enjoyment, which keeps its options open and avoids binding choice.

Ethical life

Judge William's alternative: choosing oneself, accepting duties of marriage and vocation, and giving one's life continuity in time.

Diapsalmata

A's opening aphorisms; the word recalls the musical pause marked 'Selah' in the Psalms.

Symparanekromenoi

A's invented Greek name for an imaginary society of 'fellow dead' to whom several of his essays are addressed.

Pseudonymity

Kierkegaard's practice of writing under invented authors, each with a point of view he did not simply share.

Ultimatum

The closing section of Volume Two: a sermon sent by William, written by a pastor from Jutland.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does Victor Eremita come into possession of the papers, and how does he tell A's papers from B's?
2. Comprehension According to 'Rotation of Crops', what is the root of all evil, and what techniques does A recommend against it?
3. Comprehension What does Judge William want A to do, and what reasons does he give in his letter on marriage?
4. Interpretation A presents the Seducer's Diary while claiming to be horrified by it. What does this reveal about the distance between A and Johannes?
5. Interpretation Why does A believe Mozart's Don Giovanni is the perfect expression of sensuous desire, and why does that matter for his view of life?
6. Interpretation Does the Jutland pastor's sermon confirm Judge William's position, or quietly correct it?
7. Big Question Can a person live permanently without binding commitments, or does every such life end, as William claims, in despair?

Faith Connections

• Joshua 24:15 (Scripture)

  Joshua's 'choose you this day' matches the book's insistence that some decisions cannot be postponed indefinitely, though Joshua names the Lord as the one to be chosen where William speaks of choosing oneself.

• Ecclesiastes 1:2-8 (Scripture)

  The Preacher's catalogue of weariness under the sun is a biblical counterpart to A's boredom in the Diapsalmata, ending not in a rotation of pleasures but in the fear of God.

• Ephesians 5:25-33 (Scripture)

  Paul's account of marriage as a faithful, self-giving covenant offers a theological ground for Judge William's claim that a vow fulfils love rather than ending it.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII (Great Conversation)

  Augustine's divided will before his conversion is a classic portrait of the indecision William diagnoses in A.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Through two opposed authors and a neutral editor, the book argues that a life of moods and kept options cannot hold a self together, while leaving the reader to decide whether the ethical life is the answer or only a step toward the religious.

Rhetorical device: pseudonymous framing. Victor Eremita's story of striking the desk with a hatchet to free the papers puts the reader in the position of a finder, not a pupil, and makes the absence of an author's verdict part of the argument.

Debate: Resolved: that Judge William successfully answers A's case for the aesthetic life.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Is Judge William's ethical life sufficient for a Christian, or does the closing sermon show that something further is required? Support your answer from both volumes.

Comparison with Fear and Trembling: Compare Judge William's confidence in the ethical with Johannes de Silentio's account of Abraham, and explain how the later book reopens what William thought he had settled.

Medical Lens

Melancholy is a sustained subject in the book rather than a passing mood. A's aphorisms and essays describe boredom, reflective grief and an incapacity to live in the present, and Judge William's second letter discusses melancholy directly, treating it not as an illness to be medicated but as a spiritual condition rooted in the refusal to choose oneself. Kierkegaard's journals and his father's well-known melancholy are often read into these pages; such biographical connections, and any retrospective diagnosis of the author, are interpretations rather than facts.

• Volume One, Diapsalmata

  Aphorisms in which A describes his boredom, sorrow and sense of futility with ironic detachment.

  Melancholia Depression
• Volume One, 'The Unhappiest One'

  An address on the person who lives always in hope or recollection and never in the present, a portrait of reflective unhappiness.

  Melancholia Depression
• Volume Two, 'The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical'

  Judge William analyses melancholy and despair, arguing that they arise when a person will not choose himself in earnest.

  Melancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write an exchange in which A defends 'Rotation of Crops' at a dinner party and Judge William replies, keeping each voice faithful to its volume.

• Essay

  Explain Judge William's argument that marriage preserves first love rather than destroying it, and assess whether his reasoning depends on Christian convictions he does not fully state.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into A's papers and B's letters. Each group gathers what its author says about the other, then the class discusses what each voice understands about the other better than about itself.

• Fiction

  Write a short letter from Cordelia, years after the events of the diary, to a younger friend about what she learned of flattery and sincerity.

Further Reading

• Either/Or, Parts I and II, Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong

  Complete scholarly translation in Kierkegaard's Writings, volumes III and IV.

• Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Alastair Hannay

  Abridged translation suited to classroom excerpts.

• Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard

  The next pseudonymous work, testing the ethical stage against Abraham's faith.

• Kierkegaard: A Biography, Alastair Hannay

  Places Either/Or in the context of the broken engagement and Kierkegaard's Copenhagen.