Summary: Either/Or

When you read this work for the first time, you are taken aback by its very structure. What you have here is not a systematic exposition of a doctrine, but a collection presenting two series of letters.

They are bundles of loose sheets found in the drawer of a desk by a fictional character, Victor Eremita, who decided to publish them. He is therefore not their author: he calls the author of the first letters, which make up the first part of the book, ‘A’, and the author of the second set of letters ‘B’. We later learn that the latter is called Wilhelm and works as a judge.

So Kierkegaard does not present himself here as the author of this work. We have two fictional authors, published by a third character who is just as fictional. Kierkegaard therefore seems to be writing under a pseudonym. In reality, this is a device he will use in most of his works: he stages characters—‘pseudonymous authors’—who openly present themselves as such. Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling, Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments, and so on.

Why all these precautions? Is it to avoid censorship? No. Kierkegaard explains himself in the final chapter of one of his major works, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. He acknowledges that he is the true author of all these essays, and gives, among other things, two reasons for proceeding in this way.

First, he wants to use an artistic method that gives him great freedom of invention: multiplying characters, each with their own psychology, allows him to set out several worldviews, to develop several approaches to existence, to vary them, and to set them against one another. A given doctrine will correspond to a given character: we can now see the logic behind this choice.

We might then ask: what conception of existence does Kierkegaard himself defend? What is his true doctrine, among all those upheld by his characters?

Yet Kierkegaard maintains that this question is of little interest: it belongs more to biography than to philosophy. That is the second reason: one can use pseudonymous authors because an author’s relationship to his work is merely accidental, secondary. What matters is the theory itself: What I am and how I am is a matter of indifference.¹

Naturally, commentators will not be content to follow his advice, and will try to grasp Kierkegaard’s own doctrine, rather than simply attributing it to this or that fictional character.

We now understand a little better the book’s original form; we can therefore open it and discover its content. Let us begin with its very title: Either/Or. What does it mean?

To better grasp the meaning of this enigmatic title—beautiful in its very enigma—we should turn to the book’s penultimate chapter, entitled ‘The Balance between the Aesthetic and the Ethical’.

It is here that Kierkegaard, through one of his characters, Judge Wilhelm, develops the meaning of the expression ‘either/or’.

This expression is present in every choice, every decision we have to make. In fact, it condenses and sums up the structure of choice itself. To choose is to consider the two branches of an alternative and opt for one of them: ‘Either one must do this, or one must do that’—that is what is at stake in a choice, with consequences that can be incalculable for the course of our life.

‘Making a choice in life’ is that crucial moment when we decide which direction to follow: it is choosing our very life, choosing what we will be. Nothing is more important—and we can see why this expression has such an effect on the narrator:

There are people whose souls are too dissipated to understand what such a dilemma means, and whose personality is deprived of the energy needed to say with passion: “either—or”. These words have always made a great impression on me, and they still do, especially when I utter them thus, purely and simply, for they contain the possibility of unleashing the most terrible contrasts. They have on me the same effect as an exorcism, and my soul becomes strangely grave, sometimes almost agitated.

The moment of choice, a solemn and august moment, may concern the most insignificant things. But even in such cases, the words ‘either…or’ detach themselves from the minor ideas to which they are attached, and then my soul always becomes grave.

It is Judge Wilhelm who is speaking, and he is addressing ‘A’, the author of the writings that make up the first part of the book, as we have seen.

How should we characterise him?

He is a character who has an ‘aesthetic’ conception of existence.

This notion is Kierkegaard’s own. How can we describe it as well as possible, in all its richness and complexity?

In fact, that is precisely what this chapter sets out to do. Nevertheless, we will offer a first sketch of it.

To be an ‘aesthete’, to have an ‘aesthetic’ view of life, is to pursue one’s pleasure, to refuse to commit oneself to a project, to take on responsibilities. The aesthete does not want to work, and as a result is always something of a dandy. A brilliant mind, a man of the world, sardonic, he is also somewhat nihilistic, never failing to mock the naivety of those who have the weakness to believe in any project at all—and to pursue it to the end. A bachelor and a seducer, he refuses marriage and multiplies conquests. It is a type of person we have all met—or perhaps even been ourselves at some point in our lives.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading