Kierkegaard's Either/Or: Aesthetic and Ethical Existence

Someone can spend so long examining possible lives that the examination becomes their way of living. Another person makes a commitment, then discovers that keeping it involves much more than the original decision. Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or brings these possibilities into conflict through writers whose voices cannot simply be treated as the author's own.

The question is what distinguishes a life organized around interesting possibilities from one in which a person takes responsibility for becoming someone in particular. The book gives that question a literary form. Its fictional editor presents papers he claims to have discovered, rather than a sequence of conclusions directly signed by Kierkegaard.

Either/Or appeared in 1843. Its purported editor is Victor Eremita, who describes finding the papers in a writing desk. This discovery belongs to the book's fiction. It supplies the frame through which the reader encounters different accounts of how to live.

Eremita calls the first writer A. The second is B, identified as a judge named Vilhelm, also rendered Wilhelm or William in English discussions. B's papers are letters addressed to A. Their relationship therefore matters: the ethical argument arrives as one person's effort to persuade another, rather than an impersonal theorem.

The first part contains several kinds of writing. There are short reflections as well as extended discussions of music and tragedy. “Crop Rotation” proposes an approach to avoiding boredom. “The Seducer's Diary” introduces another layer of narration around Johannes and his relationship with Cordelia.

That structure requires care with attribution. A's recommendation is not automatically Kierkegaard's recommendation. A criticism made by the judge is a claim to be examined in the encounter between the voices. The form gives readers a reason to ask what each speaker understands about the other, rather than collecting sentences as the author's personal advice.

In everyday language, aesthetic can mean a concern with beauty or artistic form. The book's contrast concerns something wider: the orientation of a life. A person can make enjoyment or the interesting the organizing concern of their relation to experience. Art appreciation alone would not establish that they live in this way.

The judge offers a compact distinction. The aesthetic is that by which someone is immediately what they are, while the ethical concerns how they become what they become. He is contrasting a life received as a set of tendencies with a task of responsible formation. The contrast belongs to his argument, not to an established psychological classification of human beings.

Immediacy in this account need not mean an absence of intelligence. A can reflect elaborately on experience. His writing can be highly cultivated. The difficulty the judge identifies is whether reflection has become a way of avoiding the responsibility of choosing, rather than a means of taking it up.

This prevents a crude division between people who enjoy art and people who do their duty. The argument does not require the ethical person to become incapable of enjoyment. What changes is the place enjoyment has within a life. The issue is whether a passing attraction can always overrule the commitments through which someone takes responsibility for themselves.

The title “Crop Rotation” invites a tempting misunderstanding. A does not merely recommend replacing one activity with another whenever interest fades. He distinguishes changing the soil from changing the method of cultivation. His proposed method seeks variety intensively, through how experience is approached, rather than only through a succession of external changes.

The principle of limitation is central to that proposal. Restricted material can provoke ingenuity. A describes the resourcefulness of a person finding amusement in very small things. His point is that the interesting can be cultivated through attention and invention within a limit.

Remembering and forgetting become arts within this strategy. A wants to manage the effect an experience has on him. He warns against being carried too far by enjoyment. The aim is to preserve a degree of control over one's relation to an experience, rather than simply surrender to every appetite.

This makes the aesthetic standpoint harder to dismiss. It includes a kind of discipline. A critic of it has to explain why disciplined management of enjoyment remains inadequate. Simply recommending concentration or persistence would not meet the position A has actually presented.

Imagine a hypothetical reader who keeps returning to the same novel while continually inventing new ways of approaching it. The absence of constant external novelty does not settle whether their life has the orientation the judge criticizes. We would still need to ask what place this activity has among their responsibilities. This illustration distinguishes the location of novelty from the ethical assessment of a life.

Johannes makes the relation between ingenuity and another person's freedom particularly troubling. In the diary, he plans changes in his behavior to influence Cordelia's responses. He wants her to experience an apparent discovery as her own. The reader can see a calculation of which she is not fully aware.

One passage describes his withdrawal as a way of changing the character of her desire. Another anticipates that she will loosen the engagement herself. Johannes values being able to produce the situation he finds erotically interesting. His language of freedom must be read alongside the concealed management through which he pursues it.

That conjunction creates a problem of recognition. Treating another person's responses as material for one's own scenario can conflict with acknowledging their independent standpoint. The criticism is not that every act of imagination is manipulative. It concerns the use of imagination to control a relationship while concealing that control.

The diary also complicates the distribution of voices. Eremita questions A's relation to the text he presents. This makes it unsafe to collapse Eremita, A and Johannes into a single speaker. The literary distance is part of what the reader must interpret.

The chapter's concern is not a clinical diagnosis of Johannes. A fictional diary can expose an intelligible pattern without establishing a psychiatric category. Nor does it demonstrate that every person reluctant to marry has the same motives. Those would be much broader claims than the story supports.

The judge's response places choice at the center of ethical becoming. He wants A to take possession of himself. Remaining suspended in deliberation does not stop a person from living. According to the judge, continued postponement changes the person who will eventually make the choice.

He illustrates this difficulty with a helmsman whose ship is moving while a turn is being considered. The alternatives are not held unchanged by the sailor's hesitation. This is an image of the temporal situation of decision. It does not prove that every decision should be made immediately.

Consider a hypothetical person deciding whether to make a promise. Deliberation can help them understand what they would undertake. But continuing to deliberate is also something they do within an ongoing relationship. The other person may need an answer before every uncertainty can be eliminated.

The example distinguishes careful thought from an imagined exemption from acting. It does not imply that reflection is worthless. It shows why obtaining information and assuming responsibility are different tasks. A completed analysis cannot perform the act of commitment in the person's place.

The judge's language of choosing oneself can initially sound like a demand to select a more attractive personality. His account is more difficult. The self to be chosen already exists, yet takes on a different character through being chosen. He explicitly distinguishes this from creating oneself out of nothing.

The person cannot simply erase the history from which they begin. The judge links self-choice with continuity. He also makes repentance central to acknowledging oneself. Taking responsibility includes a relation to what one has been, rather than selecting only the flattering parts of a personal history.

Repentance therefore has more force than regretting an inconvenient outcome. Within the judge's religiously informed argument, the person acknowledges guilt before God. This prevents treating his ethical standpoint as wholly secular willpower. Religious commitments are already present within the letters, before the concluding sermon appears.

The distinction also limits a modern application. Someone can acknowledge an inherited situation without declaring every feature of it good. Responsible acceptance of a starting point is not identical with approving every injustice connected to it. What should be revised remains a question requiring substantive judgment.

The judge sometimes emphasizes the seriousness of choosing more than choosing correctly. He suggests that wholehearted choice can lead a person to recognize that a choice was wrong. Taken in isolation, this can sound as though any sincere decision is ethically sufficient. His surrounding argument does not support that conclusion.

He distinguishes the aesthetic from evil by describing it as indifference to the distinction between good and evil. Choosing the ethical introduces that distinction as a matter that concerns the chooser. It does not make the chooser incapable of doing wrong. The ethical task continues after the initial choice.

This is why responsibility cannot be replaced by intensity. Someone may commit intensely to a harmful undertaking. Their intensity alone does not answer the question of its moral character. The judge's appeal to choice must be read with his continuing claims about duty and the good.

The letters therefore invite two separate questions. Has the person taken responsibility for choosing? What have they chosen, and how should that choice be assessed? Keeping these questions distinct allows us to understand the judge's emphasis without turning it into a permission to do anything with conviction.

Marriage is a central example in the judge's defense of the ethical. He argues for its aesthetic validity rather than accepting that commitment necessarily destroys love's value. In his account, married love has its conflict and development within time. Duration can belong to the achievement of love, rather than simply wearing it away.

The relation to duty is equally important. The judge refuses to reduce the duty of love to a catalogue of outward etiquette. Its demand concerns truly loving. Observing externally enforceable rules would not by itself establish that a person has fulfilled the responsibility of a spouse.

This is a demanding claim rather than an easy celebration of respectability. The person must make universal duty concrete as their own duty. In the judge's account, becoming ethical involves more than copying a socially approved exterior. The letters ask how responsibility can become internal to the person's activity.

His marriage example still needs critical examination. A reader can question whether his account gives adequate attention to unequal power within a relationship. A commitment's duration does not by itself establish its justice. Applying the argument responsibly requires keeping the question of what is owed to another person open.

It would also be a mistake to infer that remaining in every existing arrangement is the ethical answer. Consistency with a past decision can conflict with recognizing a present wrong. Deciding whether revision is justified requires reasons about the relationship itself. The distinction between commitment and drift cannot decide every such case in advance.

A hypothetical friendship helps expose this difficulty. Suppose two friends have promised to care for one another, but disagree about what that care requires after circumstances change. Keeping the promise may involve an uncomfortable conversation rather than repeating the same familiar gestures. The responsibility concerns the person to whom the promise was made, not only the promisor's preferred picture of being dependable. Revision and continuity are therefore not always opposites. A change in conduct may express an attempt to honor a commitment more truthfully.

This illustration is an application of the chapter's distinction, rather than a case discussed by the judge. It does not establish which friend is right. It supplies a reason to distinguish responsibility from mere behavioral repetition. An ethical assessment would still need to examine the actual promise, the circumstances of the disagreement and the other person's claims. Calling either response committed cannot replace that examination.

The book ends with a sermon the judge forwards from a priest who is his friend. Its theme is the edifying thought that, against God, we are always in the wrong. Another voice therefore enters after the main exchange between A and B. The ending should not be omitted when assessing the range of the book.

The sermon develops a relation of love to God. It distinguishes a personally appropriated conviction from a conclusion reached only through detached reflection. Its movement cannot be reduced to advice about becoming more efficient at keeping promises. The ending introduces a religious demand that changes the setting in which self-assessment takes place.

That does not make Either/Or a straightforward textbook with three completed stages. The judge's letters already contain religious claims. The concluding voice cannot simply be pasted onto them as a separate compartment. The text asks readers to interpret their relationship.

The sermon also raises difficult questions of its own. Calling oneself always wrong before God could be confused with accepting every human accusation. But those are different propositions. A claim about the divine relation does not establish that another person's exercise of power is justified.

The book's literary form leaves a task for its reader. One must identify a speaker before deciding what a sentence is doing. One must examine an argument without assuming that its location in the second part makes it Kierkegaard's final verdict. The arrangement asks for judgment rather than replacing it.

This does not mean the alternatives are interchangeable. The judge argues energetically that his account is better. A's resourcefulness poses a real challenge to a shallow defense of duty. Reading both voices carefully allows the conflict to retain its force without announcing a neutral proof that neither could contest.

For a first reading, compare “Crop Rotation” with the judge's discussion of ethical choice. Ask what each account takes a person to be responsible for. Then return to the diary to examine how another person's standpoint is treated. The concluding sermon introduces a further question about the grounds of self-assessment.

The difference between possessing possibilities and assuming a life becomes clearer through these comparisons. The book does not eliminate the need to think before acting. It makes us examine whether thought is helping us answer for our conduct or becoming the way we postpone that task. That question survives even when we reject particular answers offered by its speakers.

• Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, abridged and translated by Alastair Hannay. The edition identifies omissions; readers should distinguish its selected text from the complete work.
• Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Parts I and II, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. The complete two-part edition is useful for following the relationships among the papers and letters beyond the selections discussed here.
• Within Either/Or, read the fictional editor's preface alongside “The Seducer's Diary,” then compare the judge's account of choice with the concluding sermon. This keeps the voices and their different forms of argument in view.