Summary
Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or soon after
receiving his doctorate and breaking his engagement with Regine
Olsen. Either/Or is his first major work and remains
one of his most widely read. Kierkegaard wrote the book under a
series of false names, or pseudonyms. The book has two parts: the
first deals with the aesthetic, a word that Kierkegaard uses to
denote personal, sensory experiences. The second part of Either/Or deals
with ethics. In this part Kierkegaard discusses the merits of a
social and morally proper life. Kierkegaard wrote the first section
under the simple pseudonym “A,” although he wrote the last section
of part I, “The Diary of the Seducer,” under the pseudonym “Johannes
Climacus.” Kierkegaard wrote part II under the interchangeable pseudonyms
“B” and “the Judge.” We know now that Kierkegaard himself wrote
the entire book, but when Either/Or was first published
few people knew the author’s actual identity. A claims that the
aesthetic finds its highest expression in music, the theatre, and
love. However, the source of love and the arts’ aesthetic power
lies in their ability to inspire the imagination. A considers the
imagination to be the most useful tool in obtaining aesthetic pleasure.
B argues that living an ethical life is preferable to the aesthetic
life.
Music and drama create different kinds of aesthetic experiences. The
aesthetic pleasure offered by music is the most direct. The very best
music affects the imagination immediately. The pleasures to be found
in drama—which is too concrete and intellectual to directly fire
the imagination—lie in the viewer’s opportunity to pretend to be someone
else. The pairing of music and drama can be a particularly transcendent
aesthetic experience. A praises Mozart’s Don Giovanni,
an opera based on the story of the great lover Don Juan. The music
in Don Giovanni can be enjoyed on its own, and
it is equally enjoyable to pretend to be Don Juan. However, the
opera teaches a valuable aesthetic lesson as well, because Don Juan
is the ultimate selfish aesthete. Repetition dulls the pleasure
of an act, so Don Juan never repeats the act of love more than once
with the same woman. Although he never sleeps with the same woman
twice, by so doing he continually repeats the act of sleeping with
a new woman. He can never enjoy the woman he is with because he
is in such a hurry to get to the next one. A is devoted to pleasure
as well and sees repetition as an enemy of pleasure. However, A
believes that obtaining true aesthetic pleasure requires a more
measured approach than blindly following one’s passions, as Don
Juan does.
The extreme difficulty of achieving true aesthetic pleasure
leads A to claim that boredom is the most common, and unpleasant, human
state. In fact, A goes so far as to claim that it is the root of
all evil and makes a number of proposals for how it ought to be
dealt with. One such plan is for Denmark to borrow a large sum of
money and devote it explicitly to the entertainment of the masses.
There are also more personal measures one can take to avoid boredom.
A suggests that when receiving mail, one ought to leave it unopened
for three days because the pleasure of imagining what is in the
envelope far exceeds the pleasure to be gained from actually reading
the letter.
Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the “The Seducer’s
Diary,” which is the most famous section of Either/Or, further
explores how to maximize aesthetic pleasure. “The Seducer’s Diary”
is Johannes Climacus’s detailed, firsthand account of his wooing
a young woman named Cordelia. For the majority of the diary, Johannes
Climacus plots the seduction very slowly and deliberately. He takes
great pleasure out of planning the seduction and doesn’t even speak
to Cordelia until the last quarter of the diary. Once Johannes Climacus
makes his move, things happen very quickly, and he’s soon engaged
to Cordelia. He isn’t satisfied with the success of his seduction,
however, until he has deliberately driven Cordelia to break the
engagement and then, later, to come back to him. At this point he
is finished with her and goes to find a new woman to seduce. Once
Johannes Climacus has exhausted all the imaginative and exciting
possibilities with Cordelia, continuing his relationship with her
would lead him to boredom.
The second part of Either/Or, written
under the pseudonyms B and the Judge—who eventually converge into
a single character—takes the form of a letter written by the Judge
to A. The letter is a response to part I of Either/Or;
in it, the Judge attempts to persuade A that the ethical life is
better than the purely aesthetic life. First, the Judge attempts
to defend marriage. The Judge claims that the ethical life of being
married is better than the aesthetic life of the seducer, and the
Judge makes this claim on an aesthetic basis. The Judge says that
there is actually more aesthetic pleasure to be found in a consistent
marriage than in a bachelor life. The judge draws a distinction between
the ethical, forward-looking repetition of the married life and
the aesthetic, backward-looking recollection of the confirmed bachelor.
He further points out that romantic literature always focuses on
what happens before marriage but not what happens after, and he
claims that the aesthetic fear of repetition is actually cowardly
and selfish. The Judge argues that romantic love can exist in marriage
and goes so far as to say that marriage is the highest form of romantic
love. The ethical courage to submit to repetition is rewarded by
the consistent, reliable aesthetic pleasure found in a loving marriage.
The Judge goes on to claim that A’s devotion to the aesthetic
prevents A from making any significant choices. Although A has a
far wider range of options than the Judge, the Judge argues that
since the Judge’s choices are limited by ethics—by a consideration
of other people—his choices are much weightier and mean much more to
him than A’s aesthetic choices mean to A. The aesthetic has its place,
the Judge agrees, but the place of the aesthetic is beneath the ethical.
The Judge’s actual loving relationship with his wife is far better,
the Judge argues, than the largely imaginary relationship between
Johannes Climacus and Cordelia. The Judge experiences his pleasure
with another person, while a seducer’s pleasure is completely in
his or her imagination. Part II ends with a sermon that the Judge
has received from a friend. The sermon is entitled “The Edification
Which Lies in the Fact that in Relation to God we Are Always in
the Wrong.” The sermon’s key point is that humans, whether their
choices are aesthetically or ethically motivated, are never in the right.
Only by accepting that God is always right, and by trying to do
God’s will, can a person escape unhappiness.
