Either/Or

Søren Kierkegaard

The ideas

29 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• You have probably met someone whose outside told you nothing about their inside. A man buys an old writing desk, and one morning, when a drawer sticks, he hits it with a hatchet. A hidden door springs open. Inside are the papers of 2 strangers.

• One set belongs to a young man with no name, called A, who writes essays and scraps about pleasure and gloom. The other is letters to him from an older judge, called B. The editor refuses to say which man wins.

• What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.

• A’s scraps swing between jokes and gloom. He says of his sorrow what the Englishman says of his house: “my sorrow is my castle.” He finds his own era short on passion and turns to the Old Testament and Shakespeare, where people at least hate, love and sin.

• In a mock lecture he runs every choice through the same machine. If you wed, “you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it.” Laughing at the world and weeping over it end the same way, so he never starts down any road.

• What A wants most is not pleasure but the feeling that anything could still happen. Offered one wish, he would take an eye that always sees the possible. “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

• His longest essay argues that Mozart’s Don Giovanni stands above every other classic. Pure desire doesn’t stop to think, so words can’t hold it. Only music, which keeps moving through time, can carry it, and Don Juan is that music.

• In Greek tragedy the hero pays partly for his family’s guilt, so the sorrow runs deep and the pain stays light. A’s own age holds each person responsible for everything. He warns that “when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair.”

• He rewrites Antigone for his own time. Now she alone knows her father’s crime and hides it to honor him. Then she falls in love, and her lover keeps pressing her to open up. The secret is like an arrow in a wound: pull it out and she dies.

• Some grief never shows on the face. A describes 3 women deceived by the men they loved. None can be sure she was loved at all, so her grief keeps circling like a pendulum, and no painter could ever catch it.

• A’s club of gloomy young men holds a contest for the unhappiest man alive. The winner hopes for what already lies behind him and remembers what hasn’t happened yet. He is at home in no time at all, past, present or future.

• He also reviews a French comedy about first love. He first saw it sitting near the girl he loved, and they both laughed until they cried. Years later, engaged to someone else, she told him her fiancé was her first love.

• A’s plan for living starts from a rule: “Boredom is the root of all evil.” Most people fight it by moving, like a farmer clearing new fields. A says change the crop instead, and limit yourself, the way a bored schoolboy is entertained by a fly trapped under a nutshell.

• The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created.

• Two skills carry the method: forgetting and remembering on purpose. Never let any moment matter so much that you can’t forget it later. So A advises against friendship, marriage and any official job, since each one ties you down.

• His last trick is to enjoy things for reasons you pick yourself. Stuck with a man who gave dull lectures, A began watching the sweat roll down to the tip of his nose. After that he asked for more lectures.

• The last of A’s papers is a diary kept by a seducer named Johannes. He courts a girl called Cordelia so carefully that she later can’t tell who seduced whom. He gets engaged to her, then steers her into breaking it off herself. Once she gives in, he leaves.

• Afterward Cordelia finds no rest. She forgives him, then blames herself, then hates him, then blames herself again. The man who copied the diary admits that he can’t stop thinking about it either.

• Judge William, a married man, answers A in 2 long letters. Once A overheard a poor woman wish for 5 dollars and slipped her the money. Then he enjoyed guessing how the gift might shake her faith. The judge says A wanted to play fate.

• Love stories, the judge says, end at the wedding, just where they should begin. Falling in love feels eternal, but it rests on a feeling. He argues that marriage keeps first love alive by adding a promise and a choice made again each day.

• Some of the judge’s case belongs to 1843. He praises woman as humble, as the weaker one, and as suited to a quiet life, and he calls the push for women’s emancipation an ugly sign of the age. His case for choosing stands apart from that picture.

• A’s motto is that you’ll regret either choice, so choosing doesn’t matter. William answers with a ship’s captain. While the captain weighs turning one way or the other, the ship keeps moving. If he waits too long, where the ship ends up is no longer his choice.

• A choice made by mood is not really a choice, the judge argues, since the mood can change tomorrow. What counts is the seriousness you bring to choosing. Choose with your whole self, and even a wrong choice will show you that it was wrong.

• My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil; it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them.

• The judge tells A that “every aesthetic view of life is despair,” whether A knows it or not. His advice is to stop running from it. In despair you choose yourself, meaning the self you already are, taken on as your own.

• So then choose despair, for despair itself is a choice; for one can doubt without choosing to, but one cannot despair without choosing.

• Choosing yourself means taking your actual life, with its gifts, faults and family, as the work in front of you. A sees possibilities everywhere, but “he who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.” Even the least gifted person has a calling.

• The judge’s last word is a country pastor’s sermon. It says the comfort of having done what you could settles no real doubt. With someone you love, you’d rather be the one in the wrong. Before God “we are always in the wrong,” and the sermon calls that a joy.

• Only the truth which edifies is truth for you.

The book in short

In plain words

The desk with a secret drawer

A man buys an old writing desk. He had walked past it in a shop window for years, and one day he finally bought it, even though he didn’t really need it.

One morning he is in a hurry to leave the city. He needs money, and it is locked inside one of the desk drawers. The drawer won’t open. So he grabs a hatchet and hits the desk hard.

The drawer still won’t open. But the blow knocks something loose, and a hidden panel pops out — a secret compartment he never knew was there. Inside is a thick stack of papers.

These papers belong to two different men, and he has no idea who they are. One stack is full of clever, restless, sad little notes and essays, and even a secret diary. The other stack is two long letters from an older man, a judge, arguing with the first one about how a person should live.

The man who found the papers decides to publish both stacks in one book. He calls the first writer A and the second writer B. And here is the strange part: he refuses to tell us which one is right. He just hands us two whole lives and steps back.

So now it is our problem. Two ways to live — and nobody is going to tell us which is the better one.

The man who kept every door open

Start with the first man, A.

A is brilliant. He is funny and sharp, and he notices everything. He writes one line you don’t forget: a poet, he says, is an unhappy person whose pain comes out of his mouth as beautiful music — so the crowd claps and shouts for another song, never knowing what each song cost him.

But A lives by a single rule: never get tied down. Don’t marry, don’t take a steady job, and never promise anyone anything. Because the moment you commit to one thing, all the other things are gone for good — and where is the fun in that? A wants to keep every door open, always.

His real enemy is boredom. He even jokes that boredom is the root of all evil, that people only built cities and started wars because they couldn’t stand being bored. So he invents a trick to beat it. Most people fight boredom by getting something new — a new phone, a new friend, a new place. A says that is a trap, because the new thing gets boring too, and then you need more and more, forever.

His trick is the opposite. Don’t change your life. Change how you look at it. Get good at forgetting the dull parts. Get good at spotting tiny funny details no one else sees. Stay loose, never let anything matter too much, and you can keep life interesting forever — without ever having to choose anything.

It almost sounds right. It almost sounds like freedom.

Never really there

Almost. Here is the crack in it.

If you never choose, you don’t actually get freedom. You get stuck.

A works this out himself, and he says it like a grim joke. Marry someone, he says, and you’ll wish you hadn’t — but don’t marry, and you’ll wish you had. Laugh at the world or cry about it, you’ll regret both. Every single road ends with you wishing you had done the other thing. So A’s answer is to take no road at all. He just stands at the crossroads forever.

And standing there does something to him. A says the unhappiest person alive is not the one in the most pain. It is the one who is never really there — who spends his whole life either remembering the past or daydreaming about the future, and so is never actually in the room, in the moment he is living right now. That is A. He watches his own life go by like a movie. He never quite steps into it.

There is a darker version too, and A keeps it tucked in his papers like something he is half-ashamed of. It is a diary by a man named Johannes, who treats winning a girl’s love as a game to plan and win. He is patient, charming, and completely cold inside. And the second he wins — the second she truly loves him — he is bored, and he is gone. He writes that he loved her once, but now she can’t hold his interest. What he really wanted was the game.

That is where A’s rule finally leads. If you never let anything matter, then people stop mattering either. Even A doesn’t want to look straight at that.

A letter from a married man

So somebody writes A a letter to try to pull him out of it.

His name is B. He is older, he is a judge, and — this part matters — he is married and happy. He has read A’s papers, he actually likes A, and he thinks A is throwing his whole life away. His letter is warm where A is cold.

B goes straight at A’s favorite idea. A believes commitment kills everything good. Falling in love is magic, sure — but marry that person, A thinks, and the magic rots into boring routine. B says A has it exactly backwards.

Falling in love is only the start, B says. It is a feeling that nothing has tested yet. The real thing is what grows after you choose one person and stay — through dull days and fights and long years together. That is not the magic dying. That is the magic turning into something solid, something the first rush could never become on its own. A only ever gets the exciting beginning, again and again, because the beginning is the only part he will stick around for. He never reaches the deeper thing that waits on the far side of choosing.

You don’t lose the spark by committing, B says. Committing is where it finally becomes real.

The bravest move there is

But B’s biggest idea is bigger than marriage. It is about choosing itself.

A treats every choice as one small question: which option is better, this one or that one? B says A is missing the choice underneath all the others. The real choice is not this-or-that. It is whether you are going to be a person who chooses at all — or a person who just drifts and lets life happen to him.

And the first thing you choose, B says, is not a job or a city or a partner. It is yourself. You look at your actual life — the real one, with your family, your history, all the stuff you never picked — and you say: this is mine, and I am going to make something of it. You stop being a watcher and become someone.

B even gives advice that sounds backwards. Don’t run from your sadness, he tells A. Choose it. Walk all the way into it on purpose and feel the full weight of it — because on the far side of facing it, you finally hit solid ground, and from there you can start to build a self. The man who keeps every door open never has to feel that. He also never gets to stand anywhere.

To A, choosing looks like a cage. To B, choosing is the only thing that ever makes a person free.

Nobody can choose for you

So who is right — A or B?

There is one last surprise. After B’s letters comes a short sermon, written by a country preacher. Its message is that even B’s careful, good life is not the final answer — that all of us, even at our best, are always a little in the wrong before God, and there is a strange peace in stopping the argument and admitting it. (That last turn only lands all the way if you believe in God the way the preacher does. You don’t need to, to feel the rest.)

And then — nothing. No verdict. The man who found the papers still won’t say who won. He just leaves you holding both stacks: the brilliant restless one who refuses to choose, and the warm steady one who says choosing is everything.

That silence is the whole point. The man who found the papers could have slipped in a note telling you plainly that B’s way beats A’s. He didn’t, and that was on purpose, because reading the answer would change nothing. You would nod and stay exactly the same. The only choice that ever really changes a person is the one they make themselves.

So the question gets handed to you, and it does not get taken back. Two ways to live. Two open doors. And the one thing that turns out to be certain is this: standing in front of them forever, refusing to walk through either, is not staying free. It is just the first man’s mistake, wearing your name.

The long read

A man in Copenhagen wants an old writing desk. He passes it in a shop window for years — a secretary of no real use to him — and one morning he finally buys it. Then, rushing to catch a coach out of the city, he needs cash from a drawer that won’t open. He fetches a hatchet and strikes the desk. The drawer stays shut, but a hidden panel he had never noticed springs open, and inside is a mass of papers. He calls himself Victor Eremita, “the victorious hermit,” and he is not Kierkegaard, though Kierkegaard invented him down to the hatchet. The papers belong to two strangers he never met. One set is the work of a young aesthete he labels only A — essays, a seducer’s diary, a sheaf of brilliant unhappy aphorisms. The other is two long letters from an older married judge he labels B, written to argue A out of the way he lives. Victor Eremita sorts the two piles, hands them to a printer, and refuses — flatly, on principle — to say which man is right. That refusal is the whole design.

The editor who will not decide. Kierkegaard published Either/Or in 1843 under Victor Eremita’s name, not his own, and this is not shyness or a game. He believed some truths cannot be handed over directly. If you tell a person how to live, you give them a fact to file away; they nod and stay exactly as they were. So Kierkegaard builds a machine that forces the reader to do the one thing a lecture never makes them do — choose. He writes two complete lives, sets them flush against each other, removes any voice that could tell you the answer, and leaves you holding the question. Victor Eremita even warns you at the start that he has always doubted the tidy philosophical motto that the outer is the inner and the inner the outer — that a person’s surface shows their soul. Either/Or is a wager against that comfort: here are two men whose insides you will come to know better than anyone around them ever could, and they cannot be added up or reconciled. You get the either, you get the or, and no verdict comes.

What “aesthetic” actually means here. The word is a trap for modern readers. A’s “aesthetic” life has little to do with liking art or beauty. It names a way of living — organizing your existence around the immediate: mood, appetite, novelty, and above all what A calls “the interesting.” The aesthete lives in the moment as it strikes him, refuses anything that would bind him to a tomorrow, and treats his own life as a work to be kept perpetually fresh. He is not a brute chasing pleasure; A is one of the most cultivated minds Kierkegaard ever wrote. That is the point. The aesthetic life can be exquisite, witty, and deep — and it still has a flaw built into its foundation, which the rest of Volume I slowly exposes from the inside.

The aphorisms of a brilliant unhappy man. Volume I opens with the Diapsalmata, loose aphorisms that read like a gifted person thinking aloud at three in the morning. They are funny and bleak in the same breath. “What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.” The crowd hears the music and asks for more songs, never guessing the cost. A would “rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.” He has wit enough to seal himself off inside it: “I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his house: my sorrow is my castle.” What comes through the irony is a man stranded from his own life — admiring it, narrating it, never quite living it. He even states the structural defect of his stance without seeming to feel its weight: “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” The aesthete prefers the thing not yet done to the thing done, because anticipation can be perfect and reality never is — which means he is built to keep choosing the empty richer-seeming option, forever.

Every road ends in regret. The clearest face of the problem is a short, savage piece often printed under the title “An Ecstatic Lecture.” “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both.” The lecture runs the same verdict down every column — weep at the world or laugh at it, hang yourself or don’t — and every branch arrives at the same regret. “This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.” It is a joke, but it is the aesthete’s actual logic carried to the end. If every path leads to regret, then choosing is for fools; the clever move is to hover above all options, committing to none, keeping every door ajar. The aesthete’s “either/or” is a shrug. He treats the fork in the road as a reason never to walk.

Boredom, and the engineering against it. The essay “The Rotation Method” is the aesthete’s survival manual, and it is mock-serious in a way that keeps slipping into the genuinely serious. “Boredom is the root of all evil,” it announces, and then rewrites world history around that axis: “The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created.” Boredom spreads with the population, and all of civilization is a defense against it. A’s solution is not to plow new ground — new lovers, new cities, new thrills — because that only postpones the boredom and uses up your supply of novelty. His solution is rotation: stay where you are and change how you see it, the way a farmer rotates crops in the same field. Cultivate the art of forgetting and the art of arbitrary attention; never let yourself want anything so much that losing it could wound you; commit to nothing, marry no one, take no office, so that you stay free to keep life interesting. It is genuinely ingenious. It is also a full-time job, and what it protects you from is precisely a life with stakes.

The critic, and the man who is never present. A is at his most dazzling as a reader of other art, and two of his essays matter most. In “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic,” he argues that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the highest of all works, and his reason is precise: some things cannot be said in words at all, only in music. Pure sensuous desire — desire as sheer immediate energy, before a single reflective thought lands on it — has no language; the moment you put it into sentences you have already cooled it into something else. Music is the one medium that can carry it raw. So Don Juan is not really a schemer or even a person with a psychology; he is a force, the spirit of seduction itself made audible, and the famous catalogue of his conquests — a thousand and three in Spain alone — is less a tally than a single appetite multiplied past counting. He does not deliberate. He simply wants, and only music can hold that. The other essay, “The Unhappiest Man,” is an address to a small society A drily names the Symparanekromenoi — the fellowship of the buried, the already-dead. It opens with a story of a grave in England marked the unhappiest man; when at last someone opens it, there is no body inside. That is the whole idea in an image. The unhappiest person is not the one in the most pain but the one who is never present to himself — who lives entirely in memory or entirely in hope, mourning a past that is gone or straining toward a future that has not come, and so is absent from the only moment he actually has. A is describing his own diagnosis without quite admitting it is his.

Johannes, the seducer. Volume I ends with its most notorious piece, “The Diary of the Seducer,” which A claims to have found among yet another man’s papers — a Johannes — and reproduces with visible discomfort, distancing himself from it even as he hands it over. Johannes is the aesthetic taken to its cold limit: seduction practiced as a fine art. He does not chase a woman, Cordelia, for her body; possession would bore him. He chases the interesting — the slow, deliberate construction of a situation in which she falls in love, then is steered until she breaks the engagement herself, believing the whole thing was her own free movement. The conquest lives entirely in the design and the watching. The moment it is complete, she is nothing to him, and he is gone. It is brilliant, and it is monstrous, and Kierkegaard places it at the very end of the aesthetic volume on purpose. This is where keeping every option open and letting nothing bind you actually arrives once another human being is the material. Even A, who lives by the aesthetic, can’t fully own it.

The judge writes back. Volume II is two long letters from B, a married magistrate — Judge William, in the tradition — who knows A personally, likes him, and is trying to save him. The change in temperature is immediate. Where A is quick, ironic, and cold at the center, B is warm, earnest, a little long-winded, and entirely at home in his own life. He represents the ethical, which here is not a rulebook and not narrow “morality.” The ethical is the mode of living by commitment: choosing, taking responsibility, binding yourself to other people and to time, and through that becoming an actual self rather than a spectator of one. B’s wager is that A’s freedom is a prison, and that the way out is the very thing A most fears — a binding choice.

Marriage is not where love dies. B’s first letter, “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,” takes the aesthete head-on at his strongest point. A’s deepest charge is that commitment kills the interesting — that first love is a flame duty smothers, that marriage is the funeral of romance. B answers that this gets it exactly backwards. First love is real but unproven; it is a feeling that has survived nothing. Marriage is where that feeling is taken up into time and resolution and daily repetition, and there, tested, it becomes something the first flush could never be. The aesthete can only ever have a beginning, again and again, because a beginning is the only part that stays interesting to him. He never reaches the harder, fuller thing that lies on the far side of choosing one person and staying. B is not arguing against passion. He is arguing that passion without commitment is stuck at its shallowest moment forever.

The choice that comes before all the others. The second letter, “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical,” is the philosophical heart of Either/Or. B draws the distinction the whole work turns on: “My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil; it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them.” The first and decisive choice is not which path is good — it is whether to be the kind of person who chooses at all, who lives inside good-and-evil rather than floating above them in the aesthete’s interesting haze. And the thing you choose, first, is yourself. Not the self you’d prefer — the actual one, with this history and these conditions, chosen and taken responsibility for. The gateway is not optimism. “So then choose despair,” B says, “for despair itself is a choice; for one can doubt without choosing to, but one cannot despair without choosing.” The aesthete dabbles in doubt and melancholy as moods; B tells him to go all the way down, to despair as a deliberate act, because at the bottom of that act you finally choose yourself in what he calls your eternal validity — and stand up as a self with a life to lead. From there everything looks different: “He who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.” The world stops being a gallery of interesting views and becomes a field of things that are yours to do. And B drives the knife in gently: the aesthete is in despair already, whether he admits it or not; his irony is the symptom. The only question is whether he will choose it and so come out the other side, or keep narrating it and stay buried with the fellowship of the dead.

The sermon that ends the argument by dissolving it. And then Kierkegaard does something stranger than letting B win. B’s second letter closes by enclosing a sermon, written by a friend, an obscure pastor out on the Jutland heath, under the title “Ultimatum.” Its single thought is “As against God we are always in the wrong.” Not that God scolds and we deserve it — the reverse. To insist on being in the right against God is to stand apart, measuring, litigating, never at peace; to accept being always in the wrong before a love larger than your own is, strangely, a relief and a release into action. With this the whole contest tilts onto a new plane. The fight between A’s aesthetic and B’s ethical is not the last word after all. Both are relativized before God, and the ethical itself turns out to point past itself toward a third way of living that Kierkegaard’s later books would name the religious. The sermon ends on the note Either/Or leaves ringing: “Only the truth which edifies is truth for you” — truth is not a proposition you file away but something that has to build you up, take hold of you, change how you stand. Which is to say: even after both long volumes, you are not handed a result. You are handed a demand.

Why he would not simply tell you. The architecture is the argument. Kierkegaard could have written one clear chapter — the aesthetic life fails, the ethical is better, the religious is highest. He refused, because a person who reads that chapter and agrees has changed nothing. He has acquired an opinion about how to live, which is itself the aesthetic move — collecting interesting views from a safe distance. So Kierkegaard removed the safe distance. He gave you two living men and no judge, and made the question land on you, because the only choice that transforms a person is the one they make themselves, in the first person, with something at stake. This is the seed of everything later called existentialism: that truth, where it matters most, is subjective — not false or arbitrary, but true only when it is lived by a particular single individual who has staked their life on it. The desk held two sets of papers that will not add up. Kierkegaard’s wager is that the moment you feel the pull of both and realize no one is coming to decide for you, you have stopped reading about a self and started becoming one.

One real line. “My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil; it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them.” — Judge William, Either/Or.

What didn’t hold. These are not failed experiments — Either/Or makes no empirical claims — but the places where later readers push back.

• The women. Both life-views run on women as material. Johannes builds and discards Cordelia; even B’s warm defense of marriage idealizes “woman” into a role rather than meeting an equal. Simone de Beauvoir read the Seducer closely and used Kierkegaard’s own categories against this framing. Read today, the gender vision is the dated floor here, not the insight.
• The religious resolution. The Ultimatum only lands if you grant Kierkegaard’s Christian frame; the move that we are always in the wrong before God is an answer inside a faith, not a neutral conclusion. Later existentialists — Sartre, Camus — kept the structure (the forced choice, the leap, authenticity, the single individual) and dropped the God who completes it. So that resolution is precisely where the tradition forks.
• Whether the judge really wins. It is tempting to read Either/Or as endorsing the ethical, since B argues last and gets the sermon. But the pseudonymous frame is built to keep that open, and Kierkegaard later insisted he handed down no verdict. Treat the claim that Kierkegaard sides with the judge as one reading among scholars, not a settled fact — the refusal to decide is doing deliberate work.
• Whether life is even an either/or. The force of it comes from a hard binary, and real lives obviously blend the modes. But that objection is one Kierkegaard anticipated and would call the aesthetic evasion itself — the comfortable “both/and” that lets you never actually choose. Whether the binary is honest or rigged is the live argument Either/Or is still having with its readers.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.