Either/or

Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or is presented as a collection of papers discovered by accident and arranged by a fictional editor named Victor Eremita. The work divides into two parts, each attributed to a different anonymous author: the first, designated "A," offers essays and reflections embodying an aesthetic view of life; the second, designated "B" and identified as a judge named Vilhelm, responds with letters defending the ethical life. The structure stages a confrontation between two fundamentally opposed ways of existing without offering any final resolution.

In a preface, Eremita explains that he has long doubted the proposition that outward appearance faithfully mirrors inner life. While striking a stubborn drawer on a secondhand writing desk with a hatchet, he accidentally springs open a hidden compartment containing two sets of papers: one consisting of aesthetic essays and aphorisms, the other of ethical inquiries in letter form addressed to the first author. Unable to trace either writer, Eremita publishes them under the title Either/Or, suggesting the two halves might represent a single person who has lived through both modes of experience. He notes that the papers settle nothing, that "only the views confront each other and await no final decision in particular persons."

Part One opens with the "Diapsalmata" (refrains), a collection of A's aphorisms and lyrical fragments addressed "to himself." These pieces establish A as a figure of deep melancholy and aesthetic detachment. He defines the poet as an unhappy man whose anguish, passing through beautifully formed lips, sounds like music. He voices radical ennui, calls melancholy his "most faithful mistress," and names Echo as his only friend, because Echo does not take his sorrow away. In a parodic lecture titled "Either/Or," he declares that whatever one does, one will regret it, presenting this as the sum of practical wisdom.

In "The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic," A argues that Mozart's opera Don Giovanni represents the highest classic achievement because it unites its subject, the spirit of sensual desire, with the only medium capable of expressing it: music. He contends that Christianity, by positing spirit as its defining principle, simultaneously defined sensuality as the excluded force, and that music alone can render this sensuality in its pure immediacy. He traces three stages of unreflected erotic desire through Mozart's characters: the Page in The Marriage of Figaro (desire as dreaming), Papageno in The Magic Flute (desire as seeking), and Don Giovanni (desire as desiring). Don Giovanni is not a particular individual but a force of nature whose seductiveness operates through sheer energy rather than cunning or speech.

"Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in the Modern" examines how tragic guilt has shifted from antiquity to the present. In Greek tragedy, guilt had an "ambiguous innocence" rooted in family, fate, and the state; in modern tragedy, the individual bears full responsibility. A proposes anxiety as the distinctively modern tragic category and invents a new Antigone who carries the secret that her father, Oedipus, killed his own father and married his own mother, yet cannot share this knowledge with anyone. Her tragedy is entirely inward: She falls in love but cannot marry without either revealing her father's secret or betraying her beloved through concealment.

In "Shadowgraphs," A analyzes reflective sorrow, a form of grief that resists outward expression and can only be traced indirectly, like shadow images visible only when held against a wall. He examines three literary women deceived in love: Marie Beaumarchais (from Goethe's Clavigo), whose fiancé abandoned her under ambiguous circumstances she can never resolve; Donna Elvira (from Don Giovanni), who cannot abandon her love for Don Giovanni without losing everything; and Margrete (from Goethe's Faust), whose seducer shaped her entire sense of self, leaving her unable even to sorrow independently.

"The Unhappiest One" searches for the most wretched human being. A takes as his starting point a grave in England inscribed "The Unhappiest One" that, when opened, was found empty. He argues that the unhappiest person is one who can never be present to himself, trapped in a loop of misplaced hoping and remembering: "what he hopes for lies behind him, and what he remembers lies before him." A salutes this figure and offers the empty grave as his resting place.

"Crop Rotation" proposes A's method for managing boredom, which he considers the root of all evil. Rather than constantly changing one's circumstances, A recommends changing one's inner attitude: cultivating strategic forgetting and poetic remembering, avoiding deep attachments, and practicing arbitrariness as a mode of perception. Every experience must remain under aesthetic control, never allowed to become a binding commitment.

Part One concludes with "The Seducer's Diary," introduced by A as a document he copied from the papers of Johannes, the diary's pseudonymous author and narrator. A's preface expresses horror at the figure it depicts, though Eremita suspects A himself is the true author. The diary records Johannes's calculated seduction and abandonment of a young woman named Cordelia Wahl. Johannes engineers access to Cordelia's circle through Edvard Baxter, a young man hopelessly in love with Cordelia, and cultivates her aunt's trust. He arranges a formal engagement to Cordelia not out of love but as a strategic framework whose conventional banality is designed to make Cordelia yearn for something higher, so that she will eventually revolt against it. Through letters alternating between erotic intensity and philosophical abstraction, he awakens her passion while keeping his own presence cool and ironic. He maneuvers Cordelia into breaking the engagement herself, then consummates and immediately abandons the relationship. Three anguished letters from Cordelia, returned unopened, close the section.

Part Two contains Judge Vilhelm's responses. In "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage," Vilhelm argues that marriage is not the death of romantic love but its transfiguration. First love's weakness is its lack of inner history: It exists in the moment and collapses at the first doubt. Marriage adds the ethical intention of the vow and the religious dimension of thanksgiving to God, giving love the capacity for development over time. Vilhelm defends duty not as love's enemy but as its deepest expression, and insists that the daily acquisition of love through patience and faithfulness constitutes a beauty surpassing anything art can represent.

In his second letter, "Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality," Vilhelm urges A to "choose despair" as the path from aesthetic drift to ethical selfhood. He diagnoses A's condition as "thought-despair," a refined melancholy in which A has seen through the vanity of all finite pleasures but refuses to move forward. Every aesthetic life-view, Vilhelm argues, is already despair, since each depends on conditions that may or may not persist. He calls melancholy "hysteria of the spirit" and names it a sin. The remedy is to choose oneself absolutely: to take responsibility for one's entire concrete existence through an act of repentance that reconnects the individual to family, society, and God. The self discovered through this choice is freedom, not in the abstract but as the concrete person with all his or her relationships and history.

In a brief "Last Word," Vilhelm forwards to A a sermon written by a friend, a pastor on the Jutland moors in Denmark. The sermon argues that the only relationship to God that brings peace is one in which we freely acknowledge ourselves always to be in the wrong. The preacher draws an analogy to love: When one truly loves, one wishes to be in the wrong rather than in the right, because being right would mean the beloved has failed. This wish expresses an infinite relationship, which alone edifies. The work ends with no reconciliation between the aesthetic and ethical perspectives, leaving the reader to confront the choice on his or her own terms.