Either/Or, Volume Two

Note: Companion to [[Either-Or, Volume One]]. Volume Two is the ethicist’s reply to the aesthete. Read Volume One’s note first for the setup — the hatchet and the desk, the pseudonym game, Victor Eremita, and what A the aesthete believes.

ELI5/TLDR

Volume One showed you the aesthete’s life from the inside: a smart, charming young man who lives for the interesting and never commits to anything, ending in a diary where that logic gets pointed at a teenage girl and nobody flinches. Volume Two is his friend Judge William writing back in two very long letters saying, roughly, dude, you are in hell and you don’t know it. The book’s famous line — “Either/Or is the key of heaven” — doesn’t mean you picked the wrong side. It means the problem is that you refuse to actually choose, and the refusal itself is the thing that’s eating you. The real move of the book isn’t ethics vs. aesthetics. It’s the act of choosing itself, pointed back at your own life.

The Full Story

Who Judge William is, and why he’s a little bit boring on purpose

The second half of Either/Or is Volume Two of the manuscript Victor Eremita claims to have pried out of that writing desk. The second pile of papers turns out to be two long letters from an older married man — Assessor Wilhelm, a middle-class Copenhagen jurist, referred to throughout as Judge William or “B” — written to his younger friend, A the aesthete. These letters are the book’s attempt to answer everything Volume One just said, and they are addressed to a specific person the Judge knows and loves and thinks is quietly destroying himself.

Kierkegaard himself was not at the ethical stage. He had already leapt past it into the religious, and his translator Walter Lowrie is unusually candid about the consequences. In a translator’s preface that is more entertaining than most of the letters themselves, Lowrie says he only took on Volume Two because the “Either” couldn’t very well be published without the “Or.” He then bluntly concedes that, compared to Kierkegaard’s mature work, the avoirdupois scale is good enough for this one. He singles out the first letter as especially weak, and says of it:

“In translating the last works I never ventured to think that I could improve upon S.K.’s careful choice of expression; but here there are many passages, especially in Judge William’s first letter, which could easily be improved by a mediocre translator.”

Kierkegaard wrote Volume Two first, in a terrible personal season, and Lowrie is giving you permission up front to find parts of it tedious. The Judge is supposed to sound like a Copenhagen bureaucrat giving earnest life advice, because that is what an ethicist at the top of his form sounds like. After 370 pages of the aesthete’s gorgeous, brittle performance in Volume One, the Judge is the first character in the book who has actually put his life on the hook for anything, and he is trying to get his clever friend to do the same.

The marriage letter (and why it’s the one the translator apologizes for)

The first of Judge William’s two letters is called Aesthetic Validity of Marriage. Its argument: married love is not a downgrade from first love; it is first love, continued. The aesthete thinks romance is a mood and moods expire, so the only honest thing is to move on before the mood does. The Judge says that’s a misreading of what love actually is. Love isn’t the initial fizz. Love is the daily choice to keep loving the same specific person, and that repetition isn’t what kills it — that repetition is it.

Judge William’s own marriage is the example. He’s quite careful to note he isn’t holding it up as an ideal. He knows his wife’s nose is a little too small. He knows she doesn’t look her best in the morning. He thanks God he has never loved anyone else, and he prays he never will — not as a vow he’s white-knuckling through, but as a thing he and his wife actually pray together, because they both already know it’s what they want. The passage is, to be fair, kind of nice:

“The point with me is to renew constantly the first love, and this again in such a way that for me it has just as much religious as aesthetic significance… this renewal of our first love is not merely a sad reflection or a poetic recollection of something that has been experienced — that sort of thing produces fatigue, but this is action.”

Read on its own, that works. The problem is the hundred pages of letter around it, which argue the same point by piling up examples and excoriating the young friend for his “hypochondriac curiosity” about other people’s marriages.

The biographical backdrop is worth sitting with, because Lowrie thinks it explains everything. Kierkegaard wrote most of this letter during the two months he was deliberately destroying his own engagement to Regina Olsen by pretending to be a scoundrel — so that she would break it off and be spared the shame of being the one who was left. He was in pieces. He also, in those same weeks, was producing a document arguing that marriage is the highest form of human life. Lowrie calls it “tragic” and doesn’t try to defend the letter as philosophy. There is an “additional pathos,” he says, in watching Kierkegaard praise marriage in glowing terms at the precise moment he was tearing his own to pieces.

If you skim one part of Volume Two, skim this one. The core idea — love as continuous choice rather than expiring mood — is real and good, and you’ve now got it. The rest is the Judge picking a fight with a version of the aesthete the aesthete was never actually going to show up for.

The real letter: Equilibrium

The second letter is called Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality, and this is the one the book is remembered for. Everything that makes Kierkegaard matter as a philosopher is in here, compressed into about a hundred and fifty pages of a grown man yelling at his friend in the most earnest prose imaginable.

The first move is a redefinition of what “either/or” even means. The aesthete has been using the phrase throughout Volume One as a punchline — marry, don’t marry, you’ll regret both — a way of showing that all options collapse into the same shrug. Judge William hates this. He says the aesthete has taken the most serious words in the language and turned them into an abracadabra. Then he offers his own version, which is the center of the whole book:

“What is it, then, that I distinguish in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I would only bring you up to the point where the choice between the evil and the good acquires significance for you. Everything hinges upon this.”

That last line is the thing. The Judge’s either/or isn’t “pick the right option.” It’s “get yourself to the point where you are actually making a choice at all, instead of hovering above all possible choices the way the aesthete does.” From that point, he says, the choice of good over evil will take care of itself. You cannot be persuaded into ethics by argument — you can only be brought to the edge of the cliff where some kind of committed life becomes possible, and then pushed.

Here is the passage most people quote, because it’s the hinge the whole volume turns on:

“In making a choice it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated. Therefore, even if a man were to choose the wrong, he will nevertheless discover, precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose, that he had chosen the wrong.”

Think of it like this. The aesthete in Volume One spends the whole book deliberating between possibilities because deliberation is what he finds beautiful. He is a man who has spent six months researching the priesthood, then six months researching the theater, then six months researching law, and who can now speak brilliantly about all three and who is none of them. Judge William’s argument is that this is not neutrality. It is a decision — the decision to remain possible rather than actual — and the cost is the self. You end up, the Judge says, with a personality that is “a mere relation to others,” a face that changes with whoever is in front of it, a man who is nothing because he has never agreed to be anything in particular. And the more brilliant you are, the faster this happens, because brilliance gives you more ways to keep deferring.

Choose yourself

The next move is the one that later existentialism will pick up and run with for a century. The Judge says the real content of the ethical choice is not a thing. It’s yourself. Not yourself as an abstraction — yourself as this specific person with this specific history, this specific family, these specific regrets, this specific body, this specific limited amount of time. You can’t choose yourself by looking in a mirror and approving of what’s there. You can only choose yourself by taking responsibility for being the person you already are, down to and including the parts you wouldn’t have picked.

The Judge is explicit that this is just the Socratic “know thyself” reframed as an act of the will:

“To choose oneself is only another expression for the Socratic injunction to know oneself.”

The difference is that knowing yourself, in Kierkegaard’s hands, is not information. It’s commitment. It is the difference between reading a character sheet and playing the character. Judge William says the self you choose “is, as it were, outside of him, and it has to be acquired,” and that the price of acquisition is repentance — not as self-flagellation, but as the act of taking on everything you’ve done and everything done to you as yours. He calls this, at one point, being “born of the principle of contradiction,” meaning: you are created out of nothing by God, but you are born as a free self only when you agree to be the specific person you are. That second birth is the one you do.

Despair, but on purpose

The aesthete’s whole life is the management of a low-grade melancholy — the Rotation Method from Volume One is basically a recipe for keeping despair at a low simmer so it never gets dangerous. Judge William does not deny that the melancholy is real. He agrees with it. His argument is that the aesthete’s error is trying to ration his despair instead of going through it. The way out, he says, is not less despair but more:

“So then choose despair, for even despair is a choice; for one can doubt without choosing to, but one cannot despair without choosing. And when a man despairs he chooses again — and what is it he chooses? He chooses himself, not in his immediacy, not as this fortuitous individual, but he chooses himself in his eternal validity.”

This is the sentence everyone who ever used the word “existentialism” has been paraphrasing ever since. Choose despair. Don’t distract yourself from it with travel or new apartments or beautifully engineered seductions. Go through it, down to the point where every finite thing you’ve been clinging to has been stripped away, and what you find on the other side is the self that had been yours all along but that you had been avoiding. Doubt is a problem for your thinking. Despair is a problem for your personality, which is why, the Judge says, any simpler man can despair whereas only a clever man can doubt — despair requires no talent, only willingness.

The move is: the aesthete thinks despair is what happens to you when the rotation method fails. The Judge says despair is what happens when the rotation method works, and it’s the best thing that could happen to you, because it’s the only way you ever become a person instead of a catalogue of interesting moods.

The refutation of “both/and”

Hovering over the whole second letter is an argument with Hegel, who was the ceiling of European philosophy at the time and whose dialectic said that contradictions resolve themselves into higher syntheses — the famous “both/and” where every either turns out to be reconcilable with its or at a higher level. Kierkegaard’s Judge William says no, and Kierkegaard himself would later call “either/or” the exact opposite not only of “both/and” but of Hegelian mediation.

In plain words: some contradictions are not logical, they are existential. The question of whether to live as a person — whether to actually show up as yourself — is not a question a clever enough argument can dissolve. You either do or you don’t. There is no synthesis. The promise of “both/and” is what a modern reader would call having it both ways, or keeping your options open, or not being on the hook. The Judge says that promise is the exact shape of the aesthete’s hell: a man who has been offered a synthesis of every possibility and who now possesses none of them. This is Kierkegaard’s most consequential philosophical move, and it sets up the entire tradition from Nietzsche through Sartre through Camus. A hundred years before any of them will use the word, the Judge has already planted the flag: the self is not a conclusion. It’s a decision.

The Ultimatum

The book ends with a short third section called Ultimatum. It is not another of Judge William’s letters. It is a sermon he is enclosing, written by a country parson up in Jutland, whom the Judge says he knew in his student days. The sermon has a title that is also its entire argument: The edification implied in the thought that as against God we are always in the wrong.

The Judge sends this to A as the closing word — not the Judge’s word, somebody else’s word — and it is in a completely different register from everything that has come before it. Where Judge William has been urgent and prosy and running on pure earnestness, the parson is quiet. His claim is that the ethical life, the one the Judge has just spent a hundred and fifty pages defending, still isn’t enough. Even the man who has chosen himself, who has willed his despair, who has repented his way back into his own history and taken responsibility for his specific life, is still wrong before God. Not a little wrong. Not wrong in proportion to how hard he tried. Just wrong, all the way through, and the sooner he realizes it the better, because the recognition is the first thing that could possibly be called faith.

The parson is careful to say this isn’t meant to crush anybody. “God is always in the right,” as an observation about the universe, is cold and far away and no help to anyone. “Against God I am always in the wrong,” spoken from inside a life you are actually living, is — the parson claims — joyful, because it is how you get free of the impossible bookkeeping project of trying to prove yourself right. It is also the thing that “animates to action,” because once you stop trying to win an argument with God you finally have enough attention left over to do the next thing in front of you.

If Volume One showed you the aesthete’s hell from the inside, and the Equilibrium letter showed you the ethicist’s ladder out of it, the Ultimatum says quietly: the ladder is also not the destination. The ethical life gets you out of the aesthete’s trap, but there is a further move the ethical life can’t make on its own, and that further move is religious. Kierkegaard, writing the whole thing under pseudonyms so he wouldn’t have to sign the punchline in his own name, is revealing his hand for the first time in 900 pages. Either/Or, the book, goes as far as the ethical — and then points past itself.

What the two-volume book is actually doing

It’s a trap, in the Socratic sense. It looks like a debate between two worldviews — the aesthete making his case in Volume One, the ethicist replying in Volume Two — with an attentive reader adjudicating the winner. But Kierkegaard, hiding behind Victor Eremita and A and B, isn’t running a debate. He’s demonstrating that both positions are incomplete. The aesthete’s life is structurally unstable and ends in the horror of the Seducer’s Diary. The ethicist’s life is stable but still not sufficient, and the Jutland parson’s sermon is the moment Kierkegaard reveals it. You cannot be argued into a life. You have to be walked up to the edge of one.

Claude’s Take

Volume Two is a weirder book than Volume One. Volume One was mostly set-pieces — the Diapsalmata, the Mozart essay, the Rotation Method, the Diary — and any one of them could be pulled out and read on its own. Volume Two is two long arguments and one short sermon, and most of the first argument is the one Lowrie warns you about in the preface. I think Lowrie is right. The marriage letter is earnest in a way that’s hard to take straight, especially once you know that Kierkegaard was writing it while systematically torching the engagement that should have made him the authority on the subject. The Judge’s gender politics are 1843’s gender politics, with everything that implies. His polemic against Hegelian “both/and” requires you to care about Hegel, which most modern readers don’t. And the Judge himself, as Lowrie notes, is deliberately drawn as a little prosy — an ethicist doing his best, not a genius.

What survives all of that is the Equilibrium letter. The “choose yourself” passages and the “choose despair” passages are the moment existentialism is born as a viable intellectual position, a hundred years before Sartre and Camus will pick up the vocabulary. Nothing in Heidegger or Sartre on authenticity is doing work Kierkegaard hasn’t already done here, in plainer language, and with a considerably more human voice. The specific move — that choosing is more fundamental than what you choose, and that the self is the content of the choice, not its object — is worth the price of admission on its own. If Volume One gives you the problem (what happens to an intelligent person with too many options) Volume Two is the first serious diagnosis in European thought of what the problem actually is: not that you’re picking wrong, but that you’re refusing to pick at all, and the refusal is what’s eating you.

The Ultimatum arrives abruptly — a sermon by a character we’ve never met, tacked onto a book that’s been two ethical letters until now, with the explicit claim that the ethical itself isn’t enough. As a structural move it’s jarring. I think that’s the point. The Judge’s whole case is so forceful and so earnest that by the end of his second letter you genuinely start to believe ethics is the top of the ladder, and the Ultimatum is Kierkegaard quietly pulling the ladder away. The sermon has a calm music to it that neither of the Judge’s letters quite achieves, and the central image — being “always in the wrong” before God as a relief rather than a verdict — does land if you let it. It’s not a knockout. It’s a door opening, which is probably all Kierkegaard wanted it to be, since the book that actually walks through that door would be Fear and Trembling later the same year.

What a modern reader should take from Volume Two: skim the marriage letter, read the Equilibrium letter slowly, and let the Ultimatum be what it is. You are not reading this book for its argument against Hegel. You are reading it for the paragraphs where Judge William explains why the act of choosing your own life is more important than which life you end up with. Volume Two does not really stand on its own — without Volume One’s aesthete you don’t know who the Judge is yelling at, or why the yelling has to be this loud. But if you have read Volume One, Volume Two is the reply the whole first half of the book was secretly waiting for, and the reply is: you are allowed to be a person. Start now.