More about Søren Kierkegaard →
Victor Eremita (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) frames the work through an elaborate editorial fiction, claiming to have discovered the papers by chance in a secretary desk purchased at random—a device central to Kierkegaard’s strategy of “indirect communication,” through which the positions in the book are pointedly not presented as his own. The work is divided into two volumes, each representing a distinct approach to existence, and constitutes the opening move in Kierkegaard’s broader scheme of life-stages, later extended to include the religious in works such as Fear and Trembling and Stages on Life’s Way.
The first volume gathers the heterogeneous papers of a young aesthete known only as “A”: aphorisms (“Diapsalmata”), essays on Mozart’s Don Giovanni and on ancient versus modern tragedy, a meditation on boredom titled The Rotation of Crops, and the notorious Seducer’s Diary, attributed to one Johannes the Seducer and which A claims merely to have found. This aesthetic mode is marked by immediacy, sensuous experience, irony, and an absorption in possibility and reflection that makes genuine commitment impossible. The Seducer’s Diary, the most widely read section, caused a minor scandal in Copenhagen and was taken by many as a roman à clef about Kierkegaard’s broken engagement to Regine Olsen.
The second volume consists of long letters from Judge Wilhelm, a married Copenhagen magistrate who writes to A in an avuncular tone, advocating the ethical life of duty, responsibility, and lasting commitment. Wilhelm diagnoses the aesthete’s stance as one whose true endpoint is despair, and argues that genuine selfhood emerges not through passive reflection but through the act of choosing—the existential choice itself mattering more, in his account, than the particular content chosen. The volume closes with an Ultimatum: a sermon Wilhelm forwards to A, written by an unnamed Jutland pastor, on the theme that before God we are always in the wrong—a conclusion that already gestures beyond the ethical toward the religious sphere.
Kierkegaard uses this contrast to dramatise the tension between a life of aesthetic immediacy and one of ethical commitment, while declining to settle the matter on the reader’s behalf. The book underscores the necessity of choice as the act through which a self comes into being at all, reflecting Kierkegaard’s conviction that human existence is constituted not by reflection or pleasure, but by the venture of committed selfhood before God.
“Desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“The most beautiful time is the first period of falling in love, when, from every encounter, every glance, one fetches home something new to rejoice over.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“There are particular occasions when one may be most painfully moved to see a person standing utterly alone in the world. The other day I saw a poor girl walking utterly alone to church to be confirmed.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“Real enjoyment consists not in what one enjoys but in the idea.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“Recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“My time I divide as follows: the one half I sleep; the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep; that would be a shame, because to sleep is the height of genius.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“No one comes back from the dead; no one has come into the world without weeping. No one asks when one wants to come in; no one asks when one wants to go out.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“I prefer to talk with children, for one may still dare to hope that they may become rational beings; but those who have become that—good Lord!”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought—they demand freedom of speech.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source“There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source• Title: Either/Or
• Author: Søren Kierkegaard
• Type: Book
• Publisher: Reitzel, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Publication time: February 20, 1843
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