Either/Or, Volume One

ELI5/TLDR

Kierkegaard writes an 800-page book in the voice of someone he thinks is wrong. The narrator — a clever, melancholy, bored young man with exquisite taste and no ethical core — takes you on a tour of his mind: his aphorisms, his theories about music, his method for not getting bored, and the diary of a man who seduced a girl just to see if he could design the seduction elegantly. There is no argument, no refutation, no lesson. The book is the worldview, stated as persuasively as possible, and then handed to you to deal with. Volume Two is the ethicist writing back, but Kierkegaard publishes this half on its own, first, and lets it sit there — because the only way to show how seductive this way of living is, is to let it seduce you.

The Full Story

A found manuscript, unlocked with a hatchet

The book opens with a preface by a man named Victor Eremita — a pseudonym, because Kierkegaard doesn’t publish Either/Or under his own name — who claims he is not the author of anything inside it. He is the editor. He explains how he got the manuscript. He saw an antique secretary desk in a shop window. He walked past it every day for months and slowly fell in love with it. He went in and bought it. One morning he needed money from the drawer and it wouldn’t open. He lost his temper, fetched a hatchet, and attacked the desk. The drawer stayed shut. But a hidden compartment he had never seen before sprang open, and inside were two piles of papers.

The first pile, on good vellum, is by a young aesthete Victor calls A. It’s a mess of aphorisms, essays on music and tragedy, a long meditation on how to avoid being bored, and finally a diary belonging to a seducer named Johannes. A swears he didn’t write the diary either — he only found it and copied it out. So by the time you actually reach the Diary of the Seducer, you are reading a forgery inside a forgery inside a book about a desk someone took a hatchet to.

The second pile, on legal foolscap, is by an older ethical man Victor calls B, apparently a judge named William, writing long admonishing letters to A. Those letters are Volume Two. This summary is about Volume One only. A has the floor and nobody is allowed to answer him.

Kierkegaard told people afterward that the trick of the book was that it would not resolve. “The fact that there is no result, and no finite decision, is an indirect expression for the truth as inwardness.” If you want to know what it means to live as an aesthete, nobody gets to sit in the margin reassuring you that the aesthete is wrong. You have to sit with him for 370 pages first.

What the aesthete actually believes

A’s worldview is easier to describe than most philosophies because it isn’t one. It’s a mood with some supporting arguments. Roughly:

• Boredom is the one true evil. Not sin, not suffering, not injustice — boredom. Everything else is downstream.
• The interesting is the one real good. Whatever holds your attention, whatever keeps the next moment from collapsing into the same thing as the last, is what matters. Meaning doesn’t enter into it. Ethics definitely doesn’t.
• Commitment is a trap. The moment you tie yourself to a person, a job, a promise, a plan, you have handed your future over to repetition. Repetition is where boredom lives.
• The only safe relationship with reality is an aesthetic one. You observe, you arrange, you savor. You do not invest. You never let the thing actually happen to you — you let it happen for you, as material.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the aesthete is the patron saint of everyone who has ever used a phone. Scroll, scroll, change the app, change the angle. The aesthete isn’t looking for anything. He’s running from the gap between things.

Diapsalmata: what the mood sounds like

Before A gets to any of his essays, the book serves you about thirty pages of his aphorisms — short, beautifully tuned, moving between bitter, funny, sad, and suddenly devastating. They’re called Diapsalmata, a musical term for an interlude between psalms. The point is that before you argue with him, you should hear him sing.

A sample of what’s in them:

“Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it; marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret that… This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.”

The joke of that passage isn’t the line itself. It’s that the narrator has noticed the options genuinely are both bad, and rather than pick one, he has built a philosophy out of refusing to pick. He is never going to choose marriage or singleness, laughing or weeping, anything or anything else. He lives aeterno modo, from eternity, hovering above the either/or that the title insists you face.

Other Diapsalmata:

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”

“My grief is my castle, which like an eagle’s nest, is built high up on the mountain peaks among the clouds; nothing can storm it.”

“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”

“What is a poet? An unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music… And men crowd about the poet and say: ‘Sing for us soon again’ — that is as much as to say: ‘May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before.’”

“How terrible tedium is — terribly tedious… I lie stretched out, inactive; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I move about in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain.”

Read twenty of these in a row and the effect is not an argument but a climate. A lives inside a specific cold weather system — melancholy dressed up as wit — and he is showing you around.

Mozart, Don Juan, and things that can only be felt

One of A’s essays argues that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the single greatest work of art in any medium. The reasoning is stranger than it sounds. A claims some things in human experience are pure immediacy — pure sensuous drive, before any thought gets its hooks in — and such things cannot be put into words, because words always mean. The only medium with a real shot is music, because music carries mood without carrying ideas.

The perfect subject for music, A says, is the seducer as sheer appetite — not a man who plans a seduction, but a man who is desire, radiating outward, pulling women into his orbit without strategy. That’s Don Juan. He cannot exist in a novel; the moment you give him an inner monologue you kill him. Mozart wrote him in music and caught the one thing language is structurally unable to hold.

You don’t have to buy the argument to see what A is doing. He is staking out where the interesting lives: in the pre-verbal, the unmediated, the sensuous. Anything that can be fully explained is, to him, already dead.

The Rotation Method: a farmer’s trick for not losing your mind

The most practically famous essay in the book is called “The Rotation Method,” and it is the aesthete’s operations manual for daily life. It opens with one of the great opening lines in 19th-century philosophy:

“Starting from a principle is affirmed by people of experience to be a very reasonable procedure; I am willing to humor them, and so begin with the principle that all men are bores.”

He then runs a straight-faced argument that boredom, not idleness, is the root of all evil — an inversion of the Latin proverb that idleness is the devil’s pillow. Idleness is fine, he says; the Olympian gods were idle and they were happy. The problem is boredom, which is something else: an empty dizziness, “the nothingness which pervades reality,” a sensation like staring into a chasm. Everything ruinous in human history traces to boredom. The gods were bored, so they made man. Adam was bored alone, so Eve was created. Then Adam and Eve were bored together. Then they had children and the whole family was bored. Then came the Tower of Babel, because the nations were bored en masse and needed a project.

Read straight, this is nonsense. Read as A intends it, it’s a deliberately silly frame around a serious observation: if you take boredom seriously as the fundamental human condition, you notice that most of what people do is a half-conscious attempt to escape it, and most of those attempts fail.

Then comes the practical advice, and this is where the essay earns its reputation. The usual way people try to escape boredom, A says, is by changing the field. You get tired of the countryside and move to the city. You get tired of the city and travel. You get tired of travel and become europamüde — “Europe-tired” — and go to America. Eventually you fantasize about endless journeys from star to star. This is crop rotation in the farmer’s most primitive sense: exhaust one field, move to the next. A says this is stupid. It never works. Boredom moves with you.

The real rotation method, modeled on better farming, is to stay on the same small plot and change the cultivation. Don’t change your circumstances; change the angle you take on them. Become intensely attentive to tiny variations in the things you already have. A prisoner in solitary confinement, A notes, can be entertained for hours by a spider. Schoolchildren stuck with boring teachers become virtuoso observers of flies on desktops. Limitation is fertility. The narrower the field, the more inventive the farmer has to be, and the more the ordinary world starts to repay close attention.

The method has two main techniques. First: never go all-in on an experience. Savor it lightly. Hold something back. If you enjoy a pleasure to its absolute last drop, there will be nothing left to remember, only satiety. Second: practice the art of forgetting as a positive skill, not as passive amnesia. You should forget things actively, pruning away what you can’t use, so that what remains in memory has the shape of art rather than the shape of mud. “The art of remembering and forgetting will also insure against sticking fast in some relationship of life, and make possible the realization of a complete freedom.”

From this follow the essay’s dietary rules for the aesthete: avoid friendship, because a friend is “the superfluous third.” Never marry, because marriage is a commitment to a plot of land you didn’t choose with someone whose cultivation you don’t control. Avoid any relationship with more than one party, because plurality means loss of freedom. Keep the erotic in your life, but only as short bursts with “poetic infinitude, which can just as well be limited to an hour as to a month.”

“When two beings fall in love with one another and begin to suspect that they were made for each other, it is time to have the courage to break it off; for by going on they have everything to lose and nothing to gain.”

A modern analogy: the Rotation Method is what you do when you realize doomscrolling isn’t working, and instead of deleting the app you decide to look at one single photograph for forty minutes. It is a deliberate starvation of the external world so that the internal one blooms. As self-help it is, honestly, half-brilliant. As a way to live, it is missing the entire other half of a person.

The Diary of the Seducer: where the method becomes a problem

The book ends with the Diary of the Seducer, which is longer than everything before it and is the reason the book was infamous in Copenhagen. It’s the journal of a young man named Johannes who spots a sixteen-year-old girl named Cordelia getting out of a carriage, decides she interests him, and spends the next six months engineering her seduction with the cold care of a chess player solving a problem.

The thing to understand about this section is that Johannes does not particularly want to sleep with Cordelia. Sex is almost beside the point. What Johannes wants is the experience of designing a perfect seduction — one where every move, from the first sighting to the final night, has aesthetic necessity. He wants Cordelia to fall in love with him, then to become engaged to him, then to find the engagement claustrophobic, then to break the engagement herself so she thinks she is the one acting freely, then to return to him outside the engagement as a willing lover, and then — once she has given him everything — to be discarded, because there is nothing interesting left to do.

He writes all of this down in the diary, before, during, and after. The voice he uses is that of a connoisseur describing a wine:

“No impatience, no greediness, everything should be enjoyed in leisurely draughts; she is pointed, she shall be run down.”

The seduction works. Cordelia falls for Johannes completely. He manipulates her into breaking their own engagement. She comes back to him. They spend one night together. The diary entry the next morning is one of the most chilling things in 19th-century literature:

“Why cannot such a night be longer?… Still, it is over now, and I hope never to see her again. When a girl has given away everything, then she is weak, then she has lost everything… I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost the fragrance.”

He then wonders, as a pleasant follow-up project, whether he might manage to “poetize” himself out of the relationship in such a way that Cordelia comes to believe she was the one who tired of him first. It would be “a very interesting epilogue, which, as a matter of observation, might have psychological interest, and along with that enrich one with many erotic observations.”

The horror of the Diary isn’t lurid. It isn’t even really about sex. It’s the logical endpoint of the Rotation Method applied to another person. Johannes cultivates Cordelia the way the essay says to cultivate a field: narrowly, attentively, never spreading every sail to the wind, always holding something in reserve so that the memory will be art-shaped instead of satiety-shaped. Cordelia is a crop. The seduction is the harvest. The discard is the proper conclusion of the cultivation cycle. He is, by the standards of the previous essay, doing it correctly.

Earlier in the book, A, the aesthete who claims to have only edited the diary, writes a preface to it in which he confesses that he is afraid of what it contains — that the Seducer frightens him, that thinking about the diary at night feels like being watched by a demon. This is the closest thing to a moral warning Volume One contains. It comes from inside the aesthetic worldview, not from outside it. The aesthete himself recoils when he sees what the aesthete’s logic produces at full extension. But he can’t explain why he recoils, because he has no ethical vocabulary. The recoil is all he has, and the recoil is what Volume Two of Either/Or is going to pick up and argue from.

What Kierkegaard is actually up to

The trick of the whole book is that you can’t refute the aesthete in his own language. Any argument against him — that he’s selfish, using people, wasting his life, that Cordelia is a person and not a field — depends on ethical categories he rejects as boring. You can call him a monster. He’ll agree cheerfully and ask whether the monstering was interesting to read.

This is why Kierkegaard needs the pseudonyms and the found-manuscript frame. If a Christian philosopher wrote an essay saying “don’t marry, cultivate your boredom, seduce teenagers for aesthetic pleasure,” you’d reject it on sight. But if a fictional aesthete writes it, a fictional editor publishes it, and a fictional ethicist writes back in the same binding, you’re forced to read the aesthete first without a chaperone. By the time the ethicist shows up in Volume Two, you’ve spent 370 pages inside the worldview and know exactly how it feels from the inside. That’s the only vantage from which Kierkegaard thinks a real ethical choice can be made.

The title is doing work too. Either/Or isn’t “choose option A or option B.” It’s “choose the act of choosing itself, instead of living aeterno modo above all choices.” A’s whole life is a dodge of the moment where you stand, accept that finite decisions cost you things, and commit. Kierkegaard later described Volume One as “an existential possibility which cannot win through to existence” — a dialectically gifted human being who has replaced being alive with thinking about it, and is quietly starving inside his own cleverness. The aesthete is not an exotic Danish figure. He’s the default setting for anyone with taste, an internet connection, and too many options.

Claude’s Take

The Rotation Method and the Diapsalmata hold up beautifully. Strip away the 19th-century furniture and the essay on boredom is the best thing anyone has written on the topic before or since. It landed at least a century before Heidegger, Pascal, or David Foster Wallace took the diagnosis seriously. Kierkegaard understood that boredom is not the absence of stimulus but the presence of a specific dread, and that most of what people call ambition, travel, hobbies, and romance is boredom management dressed up. He wrote this in 1843, in a Copenhagen of 120,000 people, with no phone. It is alarming how well it reads now.

What creaks: the misogyny is real and not always ironic. Even granting that Johannes and A are meant to be monstrous, there are throwaway lines about women — “woman is and ever will be the ruin of a man” — that aren’t doing any pseudonymous work. They’re just there. Cordelia exists only as a silhouette to be seduced; she speaks only through a few letters Johannes condescendingly includes. The book insists you feel sorry for her without ever making her a person, and the asymmetry is hard to miss.

The Diary of the Seducer also goes on too long. It’s about 120 pages, and once you’ve understood the game — which takes about 20 — the rest is Johannes being pleased with himself in increasingly ornate prose. The Mozart, Antigone, Shadowgraphs, and Unhappiest Man essays are where a modern reader can legitimately skim; they’re aesthetic criticism of works and myths you probably don’t carry in your head. The big philosophical points land more clearly in the Diapsalmata and the Rotation Method.

The deeper thing the book does, and the reason people still read it, is demonstrate — rather than assert — that the aesthetic life is structurally unstable. It has no brakes. The Rotation Method sounds charming when it’s about how to stop hating your apartment and horrifying when it’s about how to break a teenage girl. The same logic is running in both cases. Kierkegaard trusts you to notice.

What a reader in 2026 should take from this: not the Christianity (it doesn’t show up until later books) and not the specific targets, but the core diagnosis. The default mode of an intelligent person with options is aesthetic. The aesthetic mode feels like freedom and in fact is a freedom from ever being on the hook for anything you do. The price, which Kierkegaard is the first writer to name clearly, is that you stop existing — you become “an existential possibility tending toward existence,” endlessly rehearsing a life you don’t actually live. The call of Either/Or is not “be good instead of bad.” It’s “be somewhere, instead of hovering.”

Worth reading. Savor the Diapsalmata slowly, read the Rotation Method twice, and take on the Diary of the Seducer knowing you are meant to admire it and be appalled by it at the same time. The appall is the whole project.