Book: Either/Or

Overview and Frame

Published in 1843 under pseudonyms, Either/Or presents two contrasting ways of life through a fictional editorial device. Victor Eremita, an urbane narrator, claims to have discovered two sets of papers hidden in a writing desk. He edits and publishes them as Part I and Part II, inviting the reader to confront an existential choice. Part I speaks with the voice of an aesthete, signed simply A. Part II consists of letters from an older official, Judge Wilhelm (or B), who addresses the aesthete and argues for the ethical life. Their conflict, either aesthetic immediacy or ethical commitment, structures the book’s inquiry into selfhood, freedom, and despair.

Part I: The Aesthetic Papers

A’s writings are a mosaic of moods, aphorisms, and essays devoted to the cultivation of interesting experience. The opening Diapsalmata offers fragmentary reflections on melancholy, irony, and the fleeting thrill of novelty. A expands this sensibility in essays that praise the ephemeral and the sensuous, most famously the study of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as the pure musical embodiment of immediate erotic desire. Music, for the aesthete, expresses an immediacy that speech and concept distort.

A’s techniques for living center on forestalling boredom. His “rotation method” proposes a deliberate alternation of interests, relationships, and environments to keep existence perpetually stimulating. He contrasts ancient and modern tragedy, favoring forms that stir subjective reflection over universal ethical norms. The culmination is “The Seducer’s Diary, ” a meticulously crafted narrative in which Johannes, a reflective seducer, orchestrates the conquest of Cordelia through manipulation and withdrawal as much as overt pursuit. The diary showcases aesthetic genius in deception, but its elegance is shadowed by emptiness. What appears as mastery reveals a life insulated from genuine commitment and haunted by ennui.

Part II: The Ethical Letters

Judge Wilhelm replies with two long letters that diagnose the aesthete’s despair and defend the ethical as a task of becoming oneself through choice. For the judge, the decisive act is choosing oneself in responsibility, an inward resolution that binds freedom to duty. Marriage serves as his privileged example: to the aesthete it seems tedious repetition; to the ethicist it is a continuing task that deepens freedom by giving it a form. He argues that the aesthetic stance fragments the self across moods and opportunities, whereas the ethical yields coherence by willing the good in and through particular commitments.

The judge explores guilt and repentance as formative, not paralyzing. Acknowledging guilt gathers the self, opening the possibility of renewal; self-accusation is more profound than self-justification because it presupposes a standard higher than inclination. The ethical person does not abolish enjoyment but orders it under responsibility, turning contingency into occasion for selfhood.

Ultimatum and Religious Intimation

The volume ends with an “Ultimatum, ” a brief upbuilding discourse that shifts the horizon toward the religious. Its central thought, before God we are always in the wrong, does not abolish ethics but deepens it, suggesting that the ethical life itself points beyond itself. The reader is left at the brink of another stage where choice becomes not merely human resolution but a relation to the divine.

Central Tension and Aim

Either/Or does not reconcile its voices. It dramatizes two comprehensive orientations: one that seeks meaning in immediacy, irony, and possibility, and one that finds it in commitment, continuity, and accountability. The text presses the reader toward decision by showing that refusing to choose is already a choice, and that the quality of a life depends less on what is chosen than on how it is chosen, either aesthetically, to avoid oneself, or ethically, to become oneself, with a hint that the deepest becoming will require the religious.