Either/Or by Kierkegaard: Summary of the Aesthetic and the Ethical Life

A book that arrives without its author’s name

Either/Or appeared in Copenhagen in 1843. Kierkegaard had begun writing it soon after reaching Berlin, and he treated that book as the real start of his philosophical work. The Danish title is «Enten-Eller. Et Livs-Fragment», which in English reads as «Either/Or. A Fragment of Life».

Kierkegaard does not appear on the title page. The work is credited to an editor, Victor Eremita, a pseudonym whose Latin meaning is «victorious hermit»: within the fiction of the book, the papers of both volumes passed through his hands.

The first volume: «A» and the aesthetic life

The first volume collects the writings of a young man whose name is never given, marked only by the letter «A». The pieces vary a great deal in tone, turning at moments to despair, and all of them circle the way he looks at existence. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes «A» as an existential type shaped on German Romantic aestheticism: an ironic, urbane figure whose chief concern is to avoid boredom and to remain a detached spectator of the sensuous pleasures of life. The same entry calls him a reflective aesthete lost in sheer possibility, and the volume builds towards The Seducer’s Diary.

Practical example: a student who enrols on a degree course and switches every year, not because the subject is wrong but because choosing closes off every other route, resembles the aesthete of the first volume. While the possibilities stay open, none of them asks anything of him.

The second volume: Judge William’s letters

Halfway through the book the voice changes. A judge takes over, Judge William, whom some translations call Assessor William, and he writes two very long letters addressed to «A» himself. His method is indirect persuasion, working to bring the recipient round to seeing something for himself. That something is that despair arises from the aesthetic life itself, and that an authentic self stays out of reach for anyone who remains inside that sphere alone. William also defends transparency and openness in communication as marks of the ethical life, and on marriage he offers a precise argument: ethical love does not shut aesthetic love out, and can hold it within itself.

What gets chosen in the «either/or» of the title

The title announces a stark alternative, and the temptation is to read it as a moral dilemma. The choice staged in the book, though, lies between two ways of existing, the aesthetic and the ethical. A moral dilemma asks which action to take; here what is in question is the sphere a person lives in, and with it the fact that a choice has to be made at all, and that it falls to the one making it.

A reader who comes to Either/Or after studying Kant’s categorical imperative finds ground quite unlike that of a universal moral law: nobody in this book hands over a rule to apply to cases. Moving from the aesthetic sphere to the ethical one is the knot that returns throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence, and it is also why the Danish writer is so often called «the father of existentialism», besides being remembered as a sharp critic of Hegel and Hegelianism.

Regine Olsen, a presence without a name

Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen on 10 September 1840: she was eighteen. On 12 October 1841 he broke the engagement off, convinced that his calling lay not in marriage but in his own path as a writer and thinker. Either/Or arrived a little over a year later, and the clash between open possibility and a commitment taken up runs through both volumes. The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen adds a qualification worth keeping in mind: Regine’s name appears in none of his books, and her presence is reflected in the love conflicts told more than once in the pseudonymous writings, Either/Or among them.

Reading the book as an account of that episode therefore goes further than the source says. The connection the source grants is a poetic one.

How loudly it landed, and where it still carries

On publication Either/Or had an immediate and strong impact on readers in Copenhagen, recognised at once as a significant literary event. Kierkegaard’s thought went on to shape the phenomenological and existentialist traditions in ways that are widely acknowledged, and the theme of the choices that define a life became material for fiction: a century later it turns up, handled with other tools, in the fiction of existential unease by Alberto Moravia.