“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
That aphorism, from the “Diapsalmata” section of Either/Or, captures the book’s method in miniature. Kierkegaard does not offer a resolution. He offers a choice — and then refuses to relieve you of the burden of making it. His pseudonymous editor, Victor Eremita (Latin for “victorious hermit”), claims to have found the manuscripts in an antique writing desk. They come from two hands: “A,” an unnamed young aesthete, and “B,” Judge Vilhelm, an older married man. Neither is the author. Neither is Kierkegaard. The reader must decide which voice to trust — and the act of deciding is itself the existential movement the book is designed to provoke.
Published in February 1843 as Kierkegaard’s first major work, Either/Or is sprawling, strange, and formally unlike anything else in philosophy. Part I is a collection of essays, aphorisms, a seduction diary, and an essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Part II is two long letters from Judge Vilhelm to the aesthete, arguing for marriage, duty, and the ethical life. The book concludes with a short sermon — a hint, barely developed, at a third possibility beyond either the aesthetic or the ethical.
What This Book Argues
The book’s argument is not stated; it is enacted. Kierkegaard presents two incompatible life-views, each in its own voice and its own form, and forces the reader to reckon with the difference. The aesthetic life, represented by “A,” is built on immediacy: the pursuit of interesting experiences, the avoidance of boredom, the cultivation of refined taste. Its horizon is the next sensation. The ethical life, represented by Judge Vilhelm, is built on commitment: marriage, work, civic responsibility, the acceptance of duties that limit freedom. Its horizon is continuity — the same person, the same promises, over time.
Kierkegaard’s point is not simply that the ethical life is better, though Judge Vilhelm argues passionately for his own position. The deeper point is that a life must be chosen. The person who drifts from pleasure to pleasure without ever committing to anything — even to pleasure itself — is not living; they are being lived by their impulses. The act of choosing a way of life — of saying “I will be this kind of person and not that kind” — is what constitutes a self. The aesthete refuses this choice and therefore has no self. He is a collection of moods.
The sermon at the end — “the thought that against God we are always in the wrong” — opens a door the book does not walk through. It suggests that the religious life transcends both the aesthetic and the ethical, but Kierkegaard leaves the exploration of that possibility for later works, particularly Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death.
Major Themes
1. The Aesthetic Life and Its Collapse
“A” is not a simple hedonist. He is intelligent, witty, culturally sophisticated. He writes brilliantly on Mozart, on tragedy, on the psychology of seduction. He knows how to extract pleasure from life with maximum refinement — his essay “Crop Rotation” is a manual for avoiding boredom by constantly changing one’s engagements, never letting anything become routine.
But the aesthetic life, Kierkegaard shows, contains the seed of its own destruction. The pursuit of the interesting eventually exhausts the interesting. When every experience is valued only for the pleasure it yields, no experience has enduring weight. The aesthete eventually arrives at despair — not a dramatic crisis, but the quiet recognition that nothing matters enough to pursue. This despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a problem to be solved within the aesthetic framework. It is the natural terminus of that framework, and the only way out is to choose something beyond it.
The “Diary of a Seducer” — the final section of Part I — is the aesthetic life taken to its logical extreme. Johannes, the seducer, does not pursue Cordelia for sex. He pursues her for the interestingness of the pursuit. He orchestrates her emotional experience like a director staging a play, and once she has been fully drawn into the drama, he withdraws. The seduction is complete not when she surrenders but when she becomes uninteresting. This is the aesthetic life stripped of its charm — cold, manipulative, and ultimately empty.
2. Choosing Oneself: The Ethical as the Path to Selfhood
Judge Vilhelm’s response to the aesthete is not a moral scolding. It is an appeal. He argues that the ethical life is not a limitation of freedom but the condition of genuine freedom. You cannot be free if you have no self to be free with — and you cannot have a self without choosing it, committing to it, and sustaining that commitment over time.
The Judge makes marriage his central exhibit. To the aesthete, marriage is boring — the same person, every day, forever. To the Judge, marriage is precisely the arena where the self is formed. You choose one person, you make promises to that person, you build a shared history, and in the process you become someone — a husband or wife, a person with a specific history and specific obligations. The repetition that the aesthete flees is, for the ethical person, the substance of life.
“The person who chooses the ethical chooses himself — not in the sense of creating himself out of nothing, but in the sense of accepting himself as a task.”
The Judge’s argument is that the aesthete’s despair is actually good news: it is the precondition for real choice. Only when you have exhausted the pleasures you thought would satisfy you can you recognize that satisfaction must come from somewhere else — from the act of choosing a life rather than consuming experiences.
3. Boredom as a Spiritual Category
One of Kierkegaard’s most distinctive contributions in Either/Or is his elevation of boredom to a theological problem. Boredom is not just unpleasant; it is the enemy of personhood. It is what happens when nothing engages you, when everything is leveled to the same flatness, when the capacity to care has atrophied.
The aesthete’s “Crop Rotation” method — constantly changing activities, relationships, environments — is an attempt to outrun boredom through novelty. Kierkegaard’s point is that this strategy is doomed. Novelty wears off, and when it does, the underlying emptiness remains. The only genuine alternative to boredom is not more stimulation but commitment — the willingness to stay with something long enough for it to reveal depths that were not visible at first glance. This is as true of marriage as it is of prayer.
“Boredom rests upon the nothing that interlaces existence; its dizziness is infinite, like that which comes from looking into a bottomless abyss.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
4. Form as Argument
Either/Or makes its argument not just through what it says but through how it is written. Part I is fragmented, aphoristic, full of abrupt shifts in tone and topic — the literary equivalent of the aesthetic life’s restlessness. Part II is epistolary, sustained, patiently argued — the literary equivalent of the ethical life’s continuity. The sermon at the end shifts register entirely, from debate to proclamation.
This formal design means the book cannot be reduced to a set of propositions. You have to experience it. You have to feel the difference between the aesthete’s glittering despair and the Judge’s settled solidity. The form is the argument: a life is not a theory; it is a way of writing yourself into the world.
5. The Religious as the Unfinished Horizon
The book ends not with resolution but with a gesture toward something beyond both the aesthetic and the ethical. The sermon appended to Part II — on the theme “against God we are always in the wrong” — suggests that the religious life is not just another option alongside the other two but a transcendence of the whole framework.
This is developed only minimally in Either/Or itself. Kierkegaard would spend the rest of his career filling in what it means. But the structure is already present: the aesthetic life cannot sustain itself, the ethical life provides a genuine self, but both remain within the horizon of what a human being can achieve. The religious life opens the possibility that the deepest transformation is not something you do but something that is done to you — that being in the wrong before God is not a problem to solve but the posture from which grace becomes possible.
Practical Applications
- Identify your default mode. Kierkegaard’s framework is a diagnostic tool. Do you tend to treat experiences — including spiritual experiences — as interesting events to be collected? Do you avoid commitments because they feel like limitations? Or do you tend toward rigidity, confusing the ethical form (doing the right things) with the ethical substance (being the right person)?
- Make a choice and inhabit it. The book’s most practical implication is that a self is formed through choosing and staying with the choice. Pick something — a relationship, a practice, a responsibility — and commit to it not for a week but for long enough that it reshapes you. The content of the choice matters less than the act of choosing.
- Read the “Ultimatum” slowly. The short sermon that closes the book — on being always in the wrong before God — is easily overlooked. Read it carefully. It changes the frame from “how do I become a good person?” to “what does it mean that I am never in the right?” — a question that leads directly to the religious stage Kierkegaard would develop through the rest of his authorship.
Lineage and Legacy
Either/Or was Kierkegaard’s breakout work. Published on February 20, 1843, in Copenhagen, it caused an immediate stir — less for its philosophical content than for its literary audacity. No one had written a book quite like it: part philosophy, part fiction, part sermon, with multiple pseudonyms and no clear authorial position.
The book’s influence on existentialism was foundational. The distinction between the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages became Kierkegaard’s most recognizable contribution to philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger all worked in the space Kierkegaard opened, though each secularized the framework by removing its religious horizon. Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism can be read as a direct response to Kierkegaard’s insistence that existence precedes essence — that who you are is what you choose to be, not what you were born to be.
The book’s critique of Hegelian philosophy — that the “system” erases the individual who must actually live — was one of the most influential philosophical objections of the 19th century. Kierkegaard’s insistence that truth is not a conclusion to be arrived at but a life to be lived reshaped the entire relationship between philosophy and biography.
No direct evidence connects Brother Watchman Nee or Brother Witness Lee to Either/Or or to Kierkegaard’s broader authorship. The recovery’s theological lineage runs primarily through the Plymouth Brethren and Keswick traditions, which did not engage significantly with existential philosophy. That said, Kierkegaard’s insistence on the irreducible inwardness of faith, his critique of institutional Christendom, and his portrayal of the believer’s direct standing before God all resonate with themes that are very much alive in the recovery.
Honest Assessment
What this book does well: Either/Or is genuinely original in form and substance. The decision to present two life-views through two distinct literary voices — and to refuse the reader any authoritative resolution — is not a gimmick. It is a philosophical argument about the nature of choice, enacted in the reading experience itself. The critique of the aesthetic life is devastating and precise, and the Judge’s defense of marriage, commitment, and ordinary ethical life is more persuasive than any abstract philosophical argument could be. The book rewards multiple readings because its meaning shifts depending on which voice you are most inclined to trust at any given moment.
The book’s limitations: At over 600 pages, Either/Or is long, discursive, and frequently self-indulgent. The essays on Mozart, on ancient tragedy, on Scribe’s comedy — these are fascinating but also digressive, and a reader who is not already interested in 19th-century European culture will find long stretches impenetrable. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous indirection, while philosophically motivated, also means the book deliberately withholds the clarity that many readers want from a work of Christian thought.
The ethical framework, for all its strengths, assumes a middle-class Danish context where marriage, career, and civic participation are available options. It has little to say to those whose circumstances preclude these commitments — or whose commitments have been shattered by forces beyond their control.
Kierkegaard’s solitary focus on the individual’s internal choice — will you be an aesthete or an ethical person? — leaves almost no room for the shaping influence of community, tradition, or grace. The self chooses itself. This is powerful and true in important ways, but it is not the whole picture, and a Christian reader should not mistake it for one.
Read This If…
Read this book if you need to be confronted with the question of what kind of life you are actually living — not what you claim to believe, but what your daily choices and avoidances reveal about where you have placed your trust.
Not suited for readers who are looking for a quick, clear, or systematically organized presentation of Kierkegaard’s thought. Either/Or demands patience. Its rewards are real, but they come to those who are willing to read all the way through the digressions, tolerate the indirection, and sit with the discomfort of not knowing which character to agree with. Many readers will be better served starting with Fear and Trembling and circling back to Either/Or once they have a feel for Kierkegaard’s method.