Either/Or, Volume Two

Book Overview

This is the other half of the argument. Volume One of Either/Or gave us the aesthete — brilliant, ironic, seductive, committed to nothing. Volume Two is the reply: two enormous letters from a middle-aged magistrate named Judge William to his young friend “A,” followed by a short sermon forwarded without comment. The aesthete dazzled. The Judge persuades.

The structure is deceptively simple. The first letter defends marriage against the aesthete’s romantic skepticism — not by denying romance but by arguing that marriage is where romance actually gets to grow up. The second letter, “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical,” is the philosophical core of the entire Either/Or project. It asks the most basic question a person can face: will you choose, or won’t you? Will you become yourself, or will you dissolve into a thousand clever reflections of other people? The final section, “Ultimatum,” is a sermon by an unnamed country parson arguing that before God we are always in the wrong — and that this is not a punishment but a liberation.

What makes Volume Two extraordinary is its voice. Judge William is warm, digressive, sometimes tedious, often funny, and always deeply in earnest. He loves his wife, his children, his work, his country. He loves his young friend too, and worries about him. The letters read like a man talking late into the night — circling back, telling stories, losing the thread and finding it again, building toward insights that arrive not as logical conclusions but as lived truths. Walter Lowrie, the translator, openly admits that parts of the first letter are badly written and could be improved by “a mediocre translator.” He is not wrong. But the rough patches are part of the texture. This is a book written at white heat by a twenty-nine-year-old genius in the middle of a personal crisis, and it shows.

This deep summary preserves the richness of the original — generous excerpts, sustained arguments, the slow accumulation of insight. It is meant to capture not just what Kierkegaard argued but what it feels like to read him arguing it. The sections follow the book’s own structure: translator’s preface, the marriage letter (theoretical and practical), the great second letter on choice and selfhood, and the closing sermon. Each section is dense. That is intentional. This is a dense book.

---

Translator’s Preface: Walter Lowrie’s Magnificent Complaint

Walter Lowrie did not want this job. He says so immediately, and the honesty is disarming. The only reason he translated Volume Two of Either/Or was because Mrs. Swenson was completing Volume One from her late husband’s fragments, and “obviously the ‘Either’ could not be published without the ‘Or.’” So Lowrie, who had set out to translate only Kierkegaard’s late religious works, found himself dragged backwards through the bibliography until he landed here, at the very beginning.

And he is not shy about his feelings:

Having been accustomed to weighing his golden thoughts by troy measure, I find that avoirdupois scales are good enough for use here. 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.

He goes further. The book, he says, “would be improved by leaving out many passages, which not only are badly expressed but often are examples, and tedious examples, of argument for argument’s sake, which is the essence of sophistry.” And then a disclaimer that reads like a warning label:

I protest here that, if in some instances the translation appears stupid or even incomprehensible, the original is no better.

This is a translator publicly washing his hands of his own text. It is wonderful.

But Lowrie softens this with biographical context. The entire book was written in eleven months, and Lowrie invokes Dr. Johnson’s response to a soprano praised for reaching the most difficult notes: “Would to God it had been impossible.” Kierkegaard was simultaneously attending lectures, studying Schelling, learning languages, defending his master’s dissertation, and suffering the private torment of his broken engagement to Regina Olsen. That he wrote anything coherent at all is remarkable. That he wrote a landmark of Western philosophy is almost offensive.

Lowrie clearly relishes the preface form itself. He confesses to “a special liking for prefaces” and notes that Kierkegaard’s most amusing book was actually entitled Prefaces — a book that will never be translated because it depends entirely on untranslatable Danish gossip. He then spins off into a delightful tangent about how every book deserves multiple prefaces: one for the reviewers (“it ought of course to be laudatory”), one for the actual readers, one chatty autobiographical preface with a portrait, and one devoted to “the prospective critic, seeking to disarm him in advance.”

The Introduction: Biography as Skeleton Key

Lowrie’s introduction provides the essential biographical frame. Kierkegaard compared himself to Alcibiades who, finding no Socrates among his contemporaries, begged the gods to transform him into one. Lowrie calls Either/Or “undoubtedly a work of genius” but “a very uneven work,” noting that the second volume’s “only spice” comes from the interjections about the young aesthete friend, “which hark back to S.K.’s aesthetic stage.”

The biographical detail that transforms the whole reading experience is this: the letter defending marriage was almost certainly written while Kierkegaard was actively trying to destroy his own engagement to Regina. He was pretending to be a scoundrel to drive her away, all while penning glowing passages about the beauty of married life. Lowrie says it plainly:

For us there is an additional pathos in this defense of the aesthetic character of marriage when we reflect that he was depicting in glowing terms the beauty of marriage just at the time when he felt compelled to renounce this happiness.

The second letter, on the ethical life, was written during four months in Berlin, where Kierkegaard was attending three to four lectures daily, taking language lessons, writing out fair copies of Schelling’s lectures, reading voraciously, and monologuing privately about Regina. From a letter to his friend Emil Boesen: “I have a feeling that I have not long to live, but I am living for a brief term and so much the more intensely.”

Lowrie also explains why the book is called Either/Or and why Kierkegaard insisted the title was more important than the contents. The “passion for disjunction” — the demand that you choose, that you not muddle along in comfortable both/and — was Kierkegaard’s central obsession. At the end of his life he wrote that “Either/Or is the key of heaven.” It was, Lowrie notes, “the exact opposite, not only of ‘both — and,’ but of Hegelian mediation.”

---

The Marriage Letter

The Letter Begins

The letter opens with Judge William explaining, almost apologetically, that what follows is less a letter than a treatise that has gotten out of hand. He is writing to his young friend “A” — the aesthete whose papers made up Volume One — and he knows his audience. He compares himself to the Prophet Nathan confronting King David with a parable: the king was happy to discuss the parable abstractly but unwilling to see that it was about him. “So to make the application plain Nathan said, ‘Thou, O King, art the man.’ Thus I too have constantly sought to remind you that what is said is about you.”

The Judge’s affection for his young friend is real and complicated. He catalogs his love in multiple registers:

I love with an aesthetic love because some day you will perhaps succeed in finding a center for your eccentric movements; I love you for the sake of your impetuosity, for the sake of your passions, for the sake of your foibles; I love you with the fear and trembling of a religious love because I see the devious paths you are treading.

He sees in A a wild horse — “throwing yourself on your haunches and then again plunging forward” — and behind it, the hand of fate holding the reins, whip raised.

The Aesthete’s Portrait

Before getting to marriage, the Judge paints a devastating portrait of his friend’s way of being in the world. A is, above all, an observer. He lives for the stolen moment, the interesting situation. At a dinner, he catches a pretty girl’s shy glance in a mirror:

Such sights you preserve as accurately and register as quickly as a daguerreotype, which as you know needs only half a minute even in the worst weather.

He recounts A’s encounter with two poorhouse women. One says wistfully, “If a body had five dollars.” A, with theatrical precision, conceals a five-dollar bill in his sketchbook, approaches with “almost subservient politeness,” hands it over, and vanishes. But what A really enjoyed was wondering about the metaphysical implications — whether the random fulfillment of a randomly expressed wish might actually drive a person to despair by negating the reality of life at its root. “So what you wanted was to play the part of fate.”

The Judge’s diagnosis is precise: A lacks faith. Instead of trusting God and taking the short cut, he prefers “the endless detour which perhaps will never bring you to the goal.” A’s intellectual flexibility is compared to a clown whose joints are so limber he can stand on his head as easily as his feet:

Everything is possible for you, and by this possibility you can astonish others and yourself; but it is unwholesome, and for the sake of your own tranquility I beg you to see to it that what is your advantage does not end by being a curse.

Stories End Where Marriage Begins

The Judge’s central argument begins with a shrewd literary observation. For centuries, novels and plays have used marriage as their destination — the knight fights, the lovers suffer, the curtain falls as they sink into each other’s arms. But “this precisely is the pernicious, the unwholesome feature of such works, that they end where they ought to begin.” Nobody has bothered to depict what happens next.

The real challenge, he argues, is not fighting external obstacles to win the beloved. It is living with love through time:

Truly it requires no great art to have courage and shrewdness enough to fight with all one’s might for the good which one regards as the only good; but on the other hand it surely requires discretion, wisdom and patience to overcome the lassitude which often is wont to follow upon a wish fulfilled.

Modern literature, he notes, has been “living on nothing else but love” while simultaneously devouring the substance of what love means. Scribe’s plays treat romantic love as an illusion. Byron declares love is heaven, marriage is hell. The age itself is “at once comic and tragic — tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.”

Romantic Love and Its Beautiful Deficiency

Romantic love, the Judge concedes, is immediate and beautiful. It follows a natural necessity, recognizes no deliberation, and carries within it a sense of eternity: “the lovers are sincerely convinced that their relationship is in itself a complete whole which never can be altered.” But this eternity is built on sand — on feeling alone, untested by anything internal. It is noble precisely because of its consciousness of eternity, which is what separates love from mere lust. “For the sensual is the momentary.”

The problem is not that romantic love is false. It is that romantic love is incomplete. It has never faced its own inner dialectic — the struggle with time, with doubt, with the ethical and religious dimensions of human life. Without these, love remains abstract, a beautiful sleepwalker:

First love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the instant doubt occurs to it, it is annihilated, it is like a sleep-walker who with infinite security can walk over the most perilous places, but when one calls his name he plunges down.

The Judge’s Own Marriage

What makes the Judge’s argument so appealing is that he keeps anchoring it in his own life. He knows his wife is not conventionally beautiful. Her nose is too small. She looks better in the evening than in the morning. But:

I know very well that her nose is not the perfection of beauty, that it is too small; but it turns itself saucily to the world, and I know that this little nose has given occasion to so much pleasant banter that, if it were within my jurisdiction, I would never wish for her a more beautiful one.

This, he insists, is a “much deeper appreciation of the significance of the accidental in life” than the aesthete’s obsessive collecting of moments. And the thing he thanks God for above all: “that she is the only one I have ever loved, the first one.” This is not the coquetry of engagement or an experiment in eroticism but “the downright seriousness of life, and yet it is not cold, uncomely, unerotic, unpoetic.”

He even describes coming home in the evening, ringing the bell in his customary way, and hearing the children and his wife making a commotion behind the door:

She so childlike that she seems to rival the children in jubilation — then I feel that I have a home.

First Love, the Religious, and Concentricity

The philosophical heart of the argument is the concept of “concentricity” — the idea that first love need not be destroyed by the ethical and religious dimensions of marriage but can be taken up into them, the way a swimming belt does not change the nature of swimming but gives it security. The religious does not stand in an “eccentric” (external, foreign) relation to love but in a “concentric” one — it surrounds and deepens what was already there.

Think of it this way: first love already contains a dim sense of eternity. The lovers already feel that their bond should last forever. But this eternity rests on nothing but feeling. Marriage takes that same feeling and gives it an actual foundation — the resolution, the vow, the ethical commitment. The eternal is no longer based on the temporal. It is based on the eternal itself.

What richness of modulation in the matrimonial “Mine!” in comparison with the erotic! It reechoes not only in the seductive eternity of the instant, not only in the illusory eternity of fantasy and imagination, but in the eternity of clear consciousness, in the eternity of eternity.

The Judge is careful to distinguish this from mere duty crushing spontaneity. Purpose, he says, is “resignation in its richest form, where it does not have in view what is to be lost, but what is to be gained by holding fast.” The will is not the enemy of love. It is what gives love legs.

Duty and Inclination: Not Enemies

One of the letter’s most striking claims is that duty and inclination are not opposed. The ethical does not kill the aesthetic — it completes it. Marriage is “the immediacy which has mediacy in itself, the infinity which has finiteness in itself, the eternal which has the temporal in itself.”

The word “husband,” the Judge admits, has “fallen into discredit and almost become laughable.” He does not care. “If the word husband has fallen into discredit, it is high time for one to seek to restore it to honor.”

The Finite “Whys” of Marriage

The Judge takes a long comic detour through all the wrong reasons people marry: for character development (a government official declares marriage “a school for character” while his wife sits mortified), for children (the state puts a premium on male offspring), for a home (a bored bachelor with a water spaniel and a full-blooded mare finally gives in). Each of these captures one real element of marriage but makes the fatal mistake of treating it as marriage’s purpose.

The story of the government official is a small masterpiece of social comedy. The aesthete has been lying in wait at this man’s tea table for weeks, and finally provokes him into holding forth on marriage-as-character-school while his wife, “no beauty,” listens in humiliation, a young married woman is scandalized, and a sixteen-year-old girl looks on in astonishment.

The Judge’s verdict on all finite purposes: “It is always an insult to a girl to want to marry her for any other reason than because one loves her.” Marriage’s true “why” is infinite and therefore, in the ordinary sense, no “why” at all. “The less ‘why,’ the more love.”

Children as Blessing, Not Purpose

On children, the Judge is especially fine. He mocks the family cult of passing children around the dinner table for admiring kisses, and yet he describes seeing a poor market woman with a carefully wrapped infant, and when a fashionable lady scolds her and a priest offers an asylum:

You should have seen the glance with which she bent down and looked at the child. If the child had been frozen, this look would have thawed it; if it had been dead and cold, this look would have recalled it to life.

Children are a blessing but not the purpose of marriage. They are a trust from God, and every father who understands this knows “that he is in the most beautiful sense of the word only a stepfather.”

The Wedding Ceremony and the Problem of Publicity

The final stretch of the theoretical argument takes up the wedding ceremony itself. Does the church service kill the erotic? The aesthete imagines his beloved at the altar, told she is a sinner, told her husband shall be her master, and he recoils: “What sort of a power is this which dares to intrude between me and my bride?” He wants to flee under the open sky, make his vow to the silent clouds, swear by the stars.

The Judge’s response is characteristically patient. First love already swears by the moon and the stars — why should it matter that it swears by something that actually has validity? And the vow does not impose fidelity from outside. It expresses what was already there, only now with the backing of eternity rather than mood. “So let Don Juan keep the leafy bower, and the knight the starry dome of heaven; marriage has its heaven still higher up.”

---

The Prose of Married Life

Having laid down his philosophical framework — that conjugal love is first love plus ethical resolve plus religious blessing — Judge William now turns to face the objections that his young aesthete friend would actually raise. What about the ceremony, the neighbors, the boredom? What about the moment when you look across the breakfast table and realize you have nothing new to say? The Judge rolls up his sleeves.

The Problem of the Congregation

The aesthete’s first horror is public exposure. He cannot stand the idea that marriage drags love before an audience — the church, the well-wishers, the congratulating neighbors. His solution to every social obligation is cash:

“By the aid of money one can liberate oneself from a multitude of ludicrous situations. With money one can stop the mouth of the church trumpeter who otherwise would loudly herald one’s nuptials. With money one can be dispensed from being proclaimed before the whole congregation as a husband, a proper husband, in spite of the fact that one would prefer to be such for one person alone.”

The Judge finds this both funny and telling. But then he does something unexpected. Instead of dismissing the complaint, he asks: what about the lonely people in your life? The old maid who still remembers her friend’s wedding dress, every subordinate detail, “more vividly perhaps than the wife herself”? A marriage is an event for these people — “a bit of the poetical woof in their humdrum life, something they long look forward to with joy and long afterwards remember.” Would you really deprive them of that?

Let us deal lovingly with the weak. There is so many a marriage which was entered upon as secretly as possible in order to enjoy the pleasure of it thoroughly, and time perhaps brought something else, brought so little that one might be tempted to say, “Well, if at least it had had the significance of giving joy to a multitude of people, it might after all have been worth while.”

This is the Judge at his best — not hectoring, but gently shifting the frame. Your privacy is not the only thing at stake.

Mystery vs. Candor

The aesthete has an elaborate theory about how married people should preserve love: through mysteriousness, strategic distance, calculated revelation. He once designed an entire imaginary castle for this purpose — separate wings, separate floors, the husband dwelling below with his library and billiard room, the wife above, each unaware of what the other is doing, meeting only when desire strikes.

“People must therefore be strangers to one another to such a degree that familiarity becomes interesting, and so familiar that the strangeness becomes a stimulating opposition. The conjugal life must not be a dressing gown in which one makes oneself comfortable, but neither must it be a corset which hampers one’s movements.”

The aesthetic program, in other words, is to treat marriage like an art installation. Keep the lighting dim, the angles oblique, the revelations partial. Never let your partner see the whole picture. But the Judge’s counter-argument is devastating in its simplicity:

You fear that when the enigmatic is over love will cease; I, on the contrary, think that love begins only when that is over. You fear that one dare not know entirely what one loves, you count upon the incommensurable as the absolutely proper ingredient; I maintain that only when one knows what one loves does one truly love.

What he means by “candor” and “open-heartedness” is not compulsive chattering. It is courage. The courage to be seen. He notes with quiet precision that secretiveness “generally has its ground in a feeling of inferiority, one would like to add a cubit unto one’s stature.” The person who hides from their partner is not protecting love — they are protecting their self-image.

The Potemkin Marriage

To prove his point, the Judge describes a marriage he observed at close range — a virtuoso performance of the mystery-system. The husband was brilliant, poetic, “too indolent to want to produce anything, but with an extraordinary flair and tact for making every-day life poetic.” His wife lived inside an enchanted circle he had constructed around her:

His home life was a little act of creation, and just as in the great creation man is that to which everything tends, so did she become the center of an enchanted circle, wherein she enjoyed nevertheless her full liberty. For the circle would bend in conformity with her movement and had no boundaries of which it might be said, “Hitherto and no further.”

She walked as in a toddling-basket, but this was not woven out of osiers, it was braided out of her hopes, dreams, longings, wishes, fears; in short, it was fabricated out of the whole content of her soul.

This husband — proud, consistent, genuinely loving — could not relinquish one private thought: “She owes everything to me.” The Judge finds this terrifying. Not because the husband was cruel, but because the whole edifice could collapse with a single word. And if it did? “I do not believe she could ever forgive him for it. For the fact that he had done it out of love for her — that her proud soul was too proud to let any one tell her.”

The Judge rescues an old-fashioned phrase: “It is said of married people that they should live in good understanding with one another.” He lingers on this word “understanding,” noting that the Potemkin couple looked like they lived in good understanding, but how could they, “when they do not understand one another?”

Is it not a pretty and beautiful and simple expression: to live in good understanding? This expression assumes as a matter of course that people understand one another clearly and explicitly.

The Strength of Women

Tucked inside the discussion of mystery is one of the Judge’s most passionate outbursts. Some husbands practice secrecy not from artistic motives but from a misguided chivalry — “Woman is weak, she is unable to bear troubles and sorrows, one must treat the weak and fragile creature lovingly.” The Judge’s response is immediate:

Falsehood! Falsehood! Woman is just as strong as man, perhaps stronger.

He builds the case layer by layer. To shield your wife from bad news is to treat her as a concubine, not a partner. To deny her access to suffering is to deny her access to God. “Have you a right to deprive her of a way of salvation?” And then the quiet knife: “Do you know whether in secret she does not sorrow and sigh, whether she has not suffered damage to her soul?”

Conquest vs. Possession

Now the Judge arrives at his central metaphor for the whole letter. The aesthete claims to be “a nature designed for conquest and not capable of possessing.” He means it as a compliment to himself. The Judge politely disagrees:

Which requires greater strength, to go uphill or to go downhill? Evidently more strength is required for the latter, if the grade is a steep one.

Conquest, he argues, is the natural, the easy, the primitive. It requires pride, violence, cupidity. Possession requires humility, patience, contentment — “fasting and prayer.” The conquering nature is like a general who overruns provinces but never governs them. Only when “by wisdom he governed them to their own best interest did he really possess them.”

True greatness, therefore, is not conquest but possession.

And the clincher: possession already contains conquest within it. The farmer who digs in the earth is also conquering, just in “an inverse direction.” The conqueror’s story has an antecedent clause but only “a suspicious dash” where the consequent should be.

The Monotony Objection

This is the big one. The aesthete calls it “custom” — “inevitable custom, this terrible monotony, the perpetual sameness in the appalling still-life of the domestic regime of married people.” The Judge mounts a multi-layered defense.

First, a linguistic correction. “Custom” properly applies only to evil — to persistence in what is harmful or to repetition so stubborn it becomes harmful. “But just as one cannot perform the good without freedom, so neither can one remain in it without freedom, and, therefore, with reference to the good one can never talk about custom.” What the aesthete calls monotony is actually constancy, which is something else entirely.

Then comes one of the most beautiful passages in the letter — the Judge’s image of marriage as a purling stream:

Often I have sat by a bit of purling water. It is always the same, the same soft melody, the same green plants on its floor, swaying beneath its quiet waves, the same little creatures running about at the bottom, a little fish which glides under the protection of the overhanging flowers, spreading out its fins against the current, hiding under a stone. How monotonous, and yet how rich in change! Such is the home life of marriage: quiet, modest, purling — it has not many changements, and yet like that water it purls, yet like that water it has melody, dear to the man who knows it, dear to him above all other sounds because he knows it.

Time as Medium, Not Enemy

The Judge’s deepest argument is about the nature of aesthetic experience itself. He traces a line from sculpture through painting through music to poetry — each art form progressively more engaged with time. But even poetry must “concentrate in the moment.” It cannot represent patience, constancy, long-suffering — qualities whose whole point is that they unfold through time rather than crystallizing in an instant.

Romantic love can very well be represented in the moment, but conjugal love cannot, because an ideal husband is not one who is such once in his life but one who every day is such.

So how can married love be aesthetic if it resists artistic representation? The Judge’s answer is startling: by being lived.

It thereby acquires a resemblance to music, which is merely because it is constantly repeated, existing merely in the instant of execution.

The highest aesthetic achievement is not something you can put on a canvas or a stage. It is the person who feels themselves to be simultaneously the poet and the poetized — who “at the moment he feels himself to be the poet possesses the primitive pathos of the lines, at the moment he feels himself poetized has the erotic ear which picks up every sound.”

The married man who has been faithful for fifteen years “has apparently got no further than he was at the beginning, yet he has lived in a high degree aesthetically.” He has not killed time but saved it:

The married man, being a true conqueror, has not killed time but has saved it and preserved it in eternity. The married man who does this, truly lives poetically. He solves the great riddle of living in eternity and yet hearing the hall clock strike, and hearing it in such a way that the stroke of the hour does not shorten but prolong his eternity.

Recollection as Amplification

The Judge offers a lovely observation about how time works differently in marriage than the aesthete assumes. Most people live either in hope or in recollection. The healthy person lives in both simultaneously. In marriage, each anniversary is not a diminishment but an enrichment:

In a beautiful way this has also found expression in married life. First comes the silver wedding, then the golden wedding. Is not recollection really the point of such a wedding? And yet the marriage terminology declares that this is still more beautiful than the first wedding.

While the world ages from gold to silver to iron, marriage inverts the sequence — starting with silver and ending with gold. Every repeated moment acquires additional crosses over its musical note, deepening the chord.

Duty as Friend, Not Policeman

The aesthete’s final objection is that marriage smuggles in duty under the guise of love. The moment the door closes, out comes “the word duty. You may deck out this scepter as much as you will, you can make it into a Shrovetide rod, it still remains a rod.” The Judge has been waiting for this one.

His answer is that duty and love are not two different things awkwardly stitched together. Duty appears only when love wavers — and when it appears, it says nothing love itself would not say:

Duty comes as an old friend, an intimate, a confidant, whom the lovers mutually recognize in the deepest secret of their love. And when he speaks it is nothing new he has to say, and when he has spoken the individuals humble themselves under it, but at the same time are uplifted just because they are assured that what he enjoins is what they themselves wish, and that his commanding it is merely a more majestic, a more exalted, a divine way of expressing the fact that their wish can be realized.

The aesthete wants love to be purely spontaneous — the moment you feel compelled, the spell is broken. But the Judge points out the hidden despair in this position. If love cannot survive the appearance of duty, then love “is not the true conquerer.” You end up disparaging both love and duty at once.

If you cannot reach the point of seeing the aesthetical, the ethical and the religious as three great allies, if you do not know how to conserve the unity of the diverse appearances which everything assumes in these diverse spheres, then life is devoid of meaning.

The connection between duty and love is like the two parts of a word: separate the letters and you destroy the sound. “Is duty hard? Eh bien, then love pronounces it, it realizes it, and thereby does more than its duty. Is love by way of becoming so soft that it cannot be held fast, well then, duty imposes upon it boundaries.”

The Closing: A Prayer and an Invitation

The Judge ends his long letter with a parable. A Serbian folk tale about a giant with a prodigious appetite who visits a poor cottager. The cottager’s table holds almost nothing. But before eating, the cottager says a prayer — “and, lo, there was enough for both.” The message is plain: if the aesthete’s appetite for experience seems too vast for marriage to satisfy, perhaps the problem is not the meal but the missing grace.

And then, with characteristic warmth, the Judge drops the philosophical apparatus entirely:

When you receive my affectionate greetings receive also, as you commonly do, a greeting from her, as kindly and cordial as ever.

He invites his young friend to visit — “not a family invitation which reads ‘forever’ and means a whole day — come when you will, sure of being always welcome; stay as long as you will, being always an acceptable guest; leave when you will, always with God’s speed.”

It is the perfect ending for a letter about marriage: not a theoretical proof but an open door.

---

Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical

This is where the book catches fire. The first letter on marriage was a warm-up, a sparring match over love and domestic life. Now Judge William steps into the ring for real, and the question is no longer whether marriage is worthwhile but whether anything is — whether the act of choosing itself has meaning, or whether the whole of existence can be laughed away with a wink.

Either/Or as Sacred Words

The Judge opens with a shout:

Either/or, aut/aut. For a single aut adjoined as a rectification does not make the situation clear, since the question here at issue is so important that one cannot rest satisfied with a part of it, and in itself it is too coherent to be possessed partially.

These two little words — either/or — land on Judge William like a spell. He describes how they have followed him his whole life, from childhood obedience to adult crossroads, how they rise up even from casual speech and suddenly put on their “official robes” like a magistrate stepping out of a crowd. For the Judge, either/or is sacred. It is the shape of seriousness itself.

The Aesthete’s Mockery

And then there is A, for whom either/or is a party trick.

The Judge lays it out with barely concealed exasperation. A treats the phrase as “a wink of the eye, a snap of the fingers, a coup de main, an abracadabra.” He tells his friends seeking advice:

“Yes, I perceive perfectly that there are two possibilities, one can either do this or that. My sincere opinion and my friendly counsel is as follows: Do it / or don’t do it — you will regret both.”

This is the famous formulation from Volume One’s “Diapsalmata,” and here the Judge calls it what it is: not wisdom but paralysis dressed up as cleverness. A has hollowed out the very concept of choosing. He uses either/or not as a disjunction but as an interjection — something you shout at mankind. The phrase that should cleave the world into meaningful alternatives has been collapsed into a joke.

The Judge sees through the performance to something darker:

Life is a masquerade, you explain, and for you this is inexhaustible material for amusement; and so far, no one has succeeded in knowing you; for every revelation you make is always an illusion… Your occupation consists in preserving your hiding-place, and that you succeed in doing, for your mask is the most enigmatical of all. In fact you are nothing; you are merely a relation to others, and what you are you are by virtue of this relation.

A is nothing on his own. He is a mirror, endlessly reflecting whatever stands before him — a shepherdess gets bucolic sentimentality, a reverend gets a brotherly kiss — and behind the mirror there is no one home.

The Midnight Hour

Here the Judge turns genuinely ominous. He asks A whether he knows what is coming:

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?

This is one of Kierkegaard’s most haunting images. The masquerade must end. The masks come off. And the man who has played so many roles that he no longer has a face underneath — that man is in real danger:

Or can you think of anything more frightful than that it might end with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that you really might become many, become, like those unhappy demoniacs, a legion, and you thus would have lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality?

The personality that refuses to choose does not stay neutral. It disintegrates. And the man who cannot reveal himself “cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”

The Ship That Keeps Moving

The Judge now builds his central philosophical argument, and it turns on one devastating insight: you cannot pause your own life while you deliberate about how to live it.

Think of it like this. A stands at a fork in the road, weighing his options with extraordinary intellectual energy, treating the moment of decision as if it exists outside of time — a frozen instant where all possibilities remain equally open. The Judge says this instant is an illusion. It has “no existence, least of all in the abstract sense in which you would hold it fast.”

Why? Because while you deliberate, you are still living. The personality keeps drifting. Choices get made by default, by unconscious habit, by the sheer momentum of days passing. The Judge reaches for one of the book’s most famous metaphors:

Think of the captain on his ship at the instant when it has to come about. He will perhaps be able to say, “I can either do this or that”; but in case he is not a pretty poor navigator, he will be aware at the same time that the ship is all the while making its usual headway, and that therefore it is only an instant when it is indifferent whether he does this or that. So it is with a man. If he forgets to take account of the headway, there comes at last an instant when there no longer is any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self.

The ship does not wait. The wind does not pause. And when you finally look up from your infinite deliberation, you discover that the current has already carried you somewhere you never intended to go. The errors have compounded. And undoing them, the Judge says, is like the fairy tale where you must play a piece of enchanted music backwards without a single mistake: “very profound, but very difficult to perform.”

The Parson and the Actor

To show what this looks like in practice, the Judge sketches A’s method of deliberation with affectionate cruelty.

Imagine A is considering whether to become a parson or an actor. He throws himself into the clerical life with terrifying intensity — goes to church three times every Sunday, befriends parsons, writes and delivers his own sermons — and within six months he can speak about the calling “with more insight and apparently with more experience than many who have been parsons for twenty years.” The real parsons annoy him. He speaks, he says, “with the voice of angels as compared with them.”

And yet: he has not become a parson. He was only visiting.

Then the same thing happens with acting. Then, just as he is ready to choose between the two, some incidental reflection spawns a third option — lawyer, perhaps — and that option has something in common with both. “Now you are lost.” The alternatives multiply. Eighteen months pass. Nothing is chosen.

“Either hairdresser / or bank teller; I say merely either/or.” What wonder, then, that this saying has become for you an offense and foolishness, that it seems, as you say, as if it were like the arms attached to the iron maiden whose embrace was the death penalty.

The joke has turned on itself. Either/or started as A’s weapon against seriousness; now it is his cage.

The Nature of the Choice

Here the Judge makes his most radical move. The problem is not choosing the wrong thing. The problem is refusing to choose at all. And the solution is not to deliberate more carefully — it is to choose with your whole self:

If you will understand me aright, I should like to say that 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.

This is the heart of the entire book. The Judge is saying that the act of choosing is more important than what you choose. Even choosing wrong with full commitment will, “precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose,” lead the chooser to discover the error and correct course. But the man who never commits — who keeps all options open, who hovers above every decision in ironic detachment — that man never consolidates into a self at all.

The Judge’s either/or, it turns out, is not a choice between good and evil. It is more fundamental than that:

My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil / or excludes them.

In other words: the first choice is whether to enter the arena of choosing at all. To accept that your actions matter, that you are accountable, that there is something at stake. The aesthete lives before this threshold. He has not chosen evil — he has not chosen anything. He is “neutral,” and neutrality, the Judge insists, is its own kind of perdition:

So many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves… they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die.

Portrait of A: The Aesthete Under the Microscope

Having laid the philosophical groundwork, the Judge now turns to a sustained, almost clinical character study of his young friend — and it is devastating in its precision.

A, the Judge explains, lives entirely in the moment. He possesses distinguished intellectual gifts — “witty, ironical, a close observer, a dialectician, experienced in pleasure” — but these gifts are enslaved to immediacy. Like an animal with senses sharper than a human’s but bound to instinct, A’s brilliance operates without transparency. He can dazzle for an instant but cannot sustain or explain anything:

Beneath all this you are constantly only in the moment, and therefore your life dissolves, and it is impossible for you to explain it.

Then comes the portrait of A’s strange rhythm of energy and collapse. The Judge has watched it many times. A stands at the street corner of life, hands in his pockets, watching the world go by with aristocratic indifference. Then something catches his attention — an idea, a smile, a situation — and suddenly he is a man possessed:

If it is an idea that has to be thought through, a book to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little romance to be experienced — yes, even a hat that has to be bought, then you take hold of the thing with prodigious strength. According to circumstances, you work indefatigably for a day, for a month; you take joy in convincing yourself that you still possess the same vigor as before… “Satan himself could not keep up with me,” you say.

But then the month ends. The half-year expires. And A simply stops. “Here the story ends.” He walks away, leaving the work unfinished, telling himself he could have continued if he had wanted to.

The Three-Day Horse Race

The Judge drives this point home with a parable. Two Englishmen traveled to Arabia to race their horses against Arabian steeds. They proposed a one-hour race. The Arab was baffled:

“I thought we should ride for three days.”

This is A in miniature. For a one-hour sprint, he is unbeatable. For a three-day race — which is to say, for a life — he cannot even begin. The strength he possesses “is the strength of despair; it is more intense than ordinary human strength, but also it lasts a shorter time.”

The Judge paints A hovering above his own existence in a kind of brilliant weightlessness:

You are constantly hovering above yourself, but the ether, the fine sublimate into which you are volatilized, is the nullity of despair, and beneath you you behold a multiplicity of subjects for learning, information, study, observation, which for you, indeed, have no reality, but which you capriciously combine and employ to adorn as tastefully as possible the palace of the mind’s luxurious delight where occasionally you sojourn.

Existence, for A, is a fairy tale. He is “often tempted to begin every speech by saying, ‘Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who unfortunately had no children.’” He can spend a month doing nothing but reading fairy tales, producing a brilliant study — and then set it all off like fireworks, a dazzling display that illuminates nothing.

Melancholy as the Root

The Judge connects all of this back to a single diagnosis: melancholy. Not ordinary sadness — melancholy in the old theological sense, which the early church counted among the cardinal sins:

What, then, is melancholy? It is hysteria of the spirit. There comes a moment in a man’s life when his immediacy is, as it were, ripened and the spirit demands a higher form in which it will apprehend itself as spirit… If this does not come to pass, if the movement is checked, if it is forced back, melancholy ensues.

Melancholy is what happens when the spirit is ready for metamorphosis but the person refuses. The spirit wants to break through into self-consciousness, into responsibility, into the ethical — and the aesthete pushes it back down, substituting pleasure or irony or cleverness. The spirit gathers like a dark cloud, its wrath producing that inexplicable heaviness that melancholy sufferers know so well. Asked what weighs upon him, the melancholy man can only say, “I know not, I cannot explain it” — and this answer is perfectly correct, because as soon as you name the cause, the melancholy lifts. It is precisely its namelessness that makes it infinite.

The Judge illustrates this through a long meditation on Nero — the imperial voluptuary who burns half of Rome and still feels nothing, who terrorizes the world because his own inner terror is unbearable, who is at bottom “a child” refusing to grow up. Nero is the aesthete taken to its logical endpoint: a man whose spirit demands transformation but who drowns that demand in ever-more-extreme sensation until sensation itself becomes meaningless. The Judge offers Nero not as a distant monster but as a warning: “Nero is alarming even after his death, for, depraved as he is, he is, nevertheless, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.”

Choose Despair

And so the Judge arrives at his shocking prescription. Not “get married.” Not “find a job.” Not “cheer up.” He says:

What then must you do? I have only one answer: despair.

This sounds insane coming from a contented family man. The Judge knows that. He hastens to explain:

When I counsel you to despair, it is not a fantastical youth who would whirl you away in the maelstrom of the passions, nor a mocking demon who shouts this comfort to the shipwrecked, but I shout it to you, not as a comfort, not as a condition in which you are to remain, but as a deed which requires all the power and seriousness and concentration of the soul.

Despair, in the Judge’s hands, is not the end but the beginning. It is the moment when you stop running from yourself and finally confront what you are. Every aesthetic life, he has argued, is already in despair — the man who builds his life on beauty, wealth, talent, or pleasure is in despair whether he knows it or not, because these things are transient. The aesthete’s despair is hidden, unconscious, evaded. The Judge wants A to make it conscious — to choose it.

Doubt vs. Despair

Here the Judge draws a distinction that is quietly one of the most important in Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Modern philosophy, he says, begins with doubt. But doubt is merely intellectual — it belongs to thought. Despair belongs to the whole personality:

Doubt is a despair of thought, despair is a doubt of the personality.

You can doubt without choosing to — it happens by intellectual necessity. But you cannot despair without willing it. This is why despair is deeper and more complete than doubt. Doubt requires talent; despair requires nothing but honesty. “The lowliest, the least talented man, can despair, a young girl who is anything but a thinker can despair.” And this universality is precisely what makes it absolute.

The philosophers of Germany, the Judge observes, have conquered doubt and found their thought tranquilized in beautiful systems — and yet they are in despair, because their personality has never been engaged. They have solved everything in the abstract and nothing in the concrete.

Choosing Oneself

And then the great turn. When you truly will despair — when you stop flinching from it, stop decorating it, stop using it as aesthetic material — something happens:

When one truly wills it one is truly beyond despair; when one has willed despair one has truly chosen that which despair chooses, i.e., oneself in one’s eternal validity.

To choose despair is to choose yourself. Not yourself as this or that — not as a clever person, a wealthy person, a talented person — but yourself in your “eternal validity,” the self that was there before all the masks and will be there after:

But what is it I choose? Is it this thing or that? No, for I choose absolutely, and the absoluteness of my choice is expressed precisely by the fact that I have not chosen to choose this or that. I choose the absolute. And what is the absolute? It is I myself in my eternal validity.

The self you choose is both discovered and created in the same act. It already existed — you could not choose it otherwise — but it only comes into being through your choice. This paradox, the Judge insists, is not a logical error but the very structure of freedom.

The treasure is buried in your own inner self. There is an either/or that makes a man greater than the angels. And it is available to everyone — the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and the poorest personality is everything when he has.

The Self as Freedom

The Judge starts with a deceptively simple question: what is it that you are choosing when you choose yourself? His answer cuts through centuries of philosophical fog:

If at the first instant I were to give the first expression for this, my answer is: It is the most abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete — it is freedom.

The self is not a fixed thing you discover, like finding a coin under a cushion. It is something that only comes into existence through an act of freedom — and yet it was already there, waiting to be claimed. The Judge illustrates this with one of his best psychological observations:

One often hears people give vent to their discontent with life, and often hears them express their wishes… Would that I had that man’s intelligence, or that man’s talent… but have you ever heard a man seriously express the wish that he might become another man?

Nobody wants to swap selves entirely. Even the most miserable person clings to being themselves. The suicide does not want to destroy the self — they want a different form for the self. And this stubborn attachment, this refusal to be someone else, is itself evidence that there is something absolute in each of us. That absolute thing is freedom.

The Paradox of Self-Choice

Here the Judge lays out the single most important dialectical move in the entire book:

In this case choice performs at one and the same time the two dialectical movements: that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence with the choice; that which is chosen exists, otherwise there would not be a choice. For in case what I chose did not exist but absolutely came into existence with the choice, I would not be choosing, I would be creating; but I do not create myself, I choose myself.

Imagine inheriting a house. You did not build it. The foundation, the walls, the leaky faucet in the bathroom — all given. But the moment you sign the papers and say “this is mine,” you take responsibility for every crack in every wall. The house has not changed, and yet it has, because now it is yours in a way it was not before. That is what choosing yourself is like:

This self which he then chooses is infinitely concrete, for it is in fact himself, and yet it is absolutely distinct from his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. This self did not exist previously, for it came into existence by means of the choice, and yet it did exist, for it was in fact himself.

You do not become a new person. You become the person you already were, but now owned, now claimed, now taken up in freedom.

Repentance as the Gateway

If the idea of choosing yourself sounds too clean, too abstract, the Judge has a correction waiting. The act of absolute self-choice has a name, and it is not a comfortable one: repentance.

When you choose yourself absolutely, you do not get to pick and choose which parts of your history to claim. You take the whole package — including the painful parts, including what was done to you, including what your parents and their parents set in motion before you were born:

He cannot relinquish anything in this whole, not the most painful, not the hardest to bear, and yet the expression for this fight, for this acquisition is… repentance. He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God.

This is one of the most striking ideas in the book. Repentance here is not guilt for something you did wrong. It is the act of saying: I take responsibility for all of this. Even the guilt of your forefathers. Even the damage inflicted on you. Not because you caused it, but because refusing it means refusing yourself:

Only when I choose myself as guilty do I choose myself absolutely, if my absolute choice of myself is to be made in such a way that it is not identical with creating myself; and though it were the iniquity of the father which passed by inheritance to the son, he repents of this as well, for only thus can he choose himself, choose himself absolutely.

The Judge even brings in his own son to make the point achingly personal:

When I see my small son running about the room, so joyful, so happy, I then think, “Who knows if after all I have not had an injurious influence upon him”… Then I say to myself, “There will come a moment in his life when his spirit will be ripened by the instant of choice, then he will choose himself, then also he will repent what guilt of mine may rest upon him.”

And then the kicker: repentance is what love for God looks like. Not adoration, not intellectual assent — repentance:

There is only one word in the language which expresses it… it is repentance. When I do not love Him thus, I do not love Him absolutely, do not love Him with my inmost being.

Despair as Doorway, Not Dead End

The Judge now circles back to despair and shows what it really is: not destruction but transformation. The whole trick is how you despair. Despair in a finite sense — clutching at what you have lost, hardening yourself against life — and you damage your soul. Despair absolutely, will it infinitely, and it becomes the gateway to the ethical life:

So then I bid you despair, and never more will your frivolity cause you to wander like an unquiet spirit, like a ghost, amid the ruins of a world which to you is lost. Despair, and never more will your spirit sigh in melancholy, for again the world will become beautiful to you and joyful, although you see it with different eyes than before, and your liberated spirit will soar up into the world of freedom.

The danger is real, though. Finite despair — the kind that grasps at specifics, that narrows and hardens — actually damages the self:

His rational soul is smothered and he is transformed into a beast of prey which will shun no expedient because all is self-defense.

But absolute despair, the kind that lets go of everything finite, is what infinitizes the self. It is the difference between a fruit rotting from within and a seed cracking open to grow.

The Ethical Does Not Destroy the Aesthetic — It Transfigures It

One of the aesthete’s deepest fears is that choosing the ethical means losing everything beautiful about life — the moods, the pleasures, the rich particularity of experience. The Judge insists this is exactly backwards:

By despair nothing is destroyed, all of the aesthetical remains in a man, only it is reduced to a ministering role and thereby precisely is preserved.

The aesthetic life is like a garden where every herb has equal claim to grow. There is no organizing principle, so the garden grows wild and eventually chokes itself. The ethical person does not rip out the plants — they cultivate them:

The ethical then will not change the individual into another man but makes him himself, it will not annihilate the aesthetical but transfigures it.

And this is the key: the ethical person may do exactly the same things as the aesthetic person. They may enjoy the same pleasures, feel the same moods, pursue the same interests. The difference is invisible until a limit is reached — a moment when the ethical person stops and the aesthetic person does not:

The man who lives ethically may do exactly the same things as the man who lives aesthetically, so that for a time this may create a deception, but finally there comes an instant when it is evident that he who lives ethically has a limit which the other does not recognize.

The Narcissus Trap

There is a beautiful wrong turn the Judge warns about — a spiritual dead end that looks like genuine self-choice but is not. A person grasps their own eternal validity, is overwhelmed by the fullness of it, and then… stops. They gaze at themselves. Time becomes an enemy. Everything external seems trivial compared to this inner possession:

He has not chosen himself, like Narcissus he has fallen in love with himself. Such a situation has certainly ended not infrequently in suicide.

The error is subtle: this person has seen themselves under the category of necessity, not freedom. They have contemplated the self but have not acted on it:

If he does that, then the very instant he chooses himself he is in motion; concrete as his self is, he has nevertheless chosen himself in accordance with his possibility, in repentance he has ransomed himself for the sake of remaining in his freedom, but he can remain in his freedom only by constantly realizing it. He, therefore, who has chosen himself is eo ipso active.

Freedom is not a possession. It is an activity. Stop exercising it and you have already lost it.

Against the Mystic: Choose Yourself Back Into the World

The Judge spends considerable time on a figure who seems like the ethical person’s natural ally but turns out to be a cautionary tale: the mystic. The mystic chooses God, withdraws from the world, lives for inward experience. What is wrong with that?

Everything, says the Judge. The mystic’s fundamental error is choosing himself abstractly — choosing himself out of the world without choosing himself back into it:

The truly concrete choice is that wherewith at the very same instant I choose myself out of the world I am choosing myself back into the world. For when I choose myself repentantly I gather myself together in all my finite concretion, and in the fact that I have thus chosen myself out of the finite I am in the most absolute continuity with it.

The mystic’s life oscillates between ecstatic highs and dull lows with no real development in between — movement without continuity, repetition without growth. The most damning charge: the mystic is intrusive with God and negligent toward the world God actually placed them in. He quotes Samuel — “To obey is better than sacrifice” — and drops one of his most pointed personal asides: “It is especially as a husband, as a father, that I am an enemy of mysticism.”

The fault of the mystic is that by his choice he does not become concrete for himself, nor for God either; he chooses himself abstractly and therefore lacks transparency. For it is a mistake to think that the abstract is the transparent. The abstract is the turbid, the foggy.

Clarity comes from concreteness. Fog comes from abstraction. The mystic who thinks they are seeing God most clearly is actually seeing through the densest mist.

The Self as Its Own Task

Now the Judge arrives at his positive vision: what does the ethically chosen life actually look like? The person who has chosen themselves absolutely does not rest in possession of themselves. They have themselves as a task:

This concretion is the reality of the individual, but as he chooses it in accord with his freedom one can also say that it is his possibility, or (to avoid an expression so aesthetical) that it is his task. For he who lives aesthetically sees only possibilities everywhere, they constitute for him the content of the future, whereas he who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.

This is an enormous difference in how you see the world. The aesthete sees life as a menu of options. The ethical person sees life as a workshop full of assignments — not imposed from outside, but arising naturally from who they concretely are.

And here is the freedom in it: the ethical person is never destroyed by circumstance. Lost the job? New task. Wrong marriage? Task within the task. The world falls apart? There is always something left:

When the storm broods over him so darkly that his neighbor cannot see him, he nevertheless has not perished, there is always a point he holds fast, and that is… his self.

The aesthete’s life runs on the principle “to be or not to be” — one unfulfilled condition and the whole thing collapses. The ethical person is resilient because their foundation is not external.

Duty from the Inside

The Judge tackles the most common complaint against ethical life: that duty is boring, external, a list of obligations that crushes the spirit. His response: that is not duty at all. That is a misunderstanding of duty:

When duty is viewed thus it is a sign that the individual is in himself correctly oriented. For him, therefore, duty will not split up into a congeries of particular definitions, for that is always an indication that he stands in an outward relation to it. He has clad himself in duty, for him it is the expression of his inmost nature.

Duty is not something imposed on you from the outside. It is something that arises from within when you have chosen yourself properly. We say “my duty,” not just “duty.” I do my duty, you do yours. Duty is always particular, always personal, even though it is universal in form:

Duty is the universal which is required of me; so if I am not the universal, I am unable to perform duty. On the other hand, my duty is the particular, something for me alone, and yet it is duty and hence the universal. Here personality is displayed in its highest validity.

The Judge shares a childhood memory that captures the whole idea better than any theory: being given his first school lesson to memorize at age five, feeling the weight of it as though heaven and earth depended on it:

To me it was as if heaven and earth might collapse if I did not learn my lesson, and on the other hand as if, even if heaven and earth were to collapse, this would not exempt me from doing what was assigned to me.

That feeling — that single duty, felt with absolute seriousness — is worth more than any catalog of moral rules.

The Universal and the Particular

The ethical person becomes what the Judge calls “the universal man” — but not by shedding their particularity, not by becoming a bland everyman. The universal breaks through the concrete, like a paradigmatic verb in grammar. Every verb could serve as the paradigm; the one chosen is accidental, but it carries the universal form within it:

Every man can, if he will, become the paradigmatic man, not by wiping out his accidentality but by remaining in it and ennobling it. But he ennobles it by choosing it.

This is the secret of conscience: that each individual life is simultaneously completely particular and completely universal. You do not achieve the universal by stripping away what makes you you. You achieve it by owning every bit of your concreteness so thoroughly that the universal shines through it.

Beauty Belongs to the Ethical

The Judge’s final philosophical move is perhaps his most surprising: he claims beauty for the ethical life. The aesthete defines beauty as “that which has its teleology in itself.” Fine, says the Judge — but only the ethical person actually has that. Nature just sits there. Art requires someone else to set it in motion. Only the person who has chosen themselves, who moves through the world freely from themselves through the world back to themselves, genuinely has inner teleology:

His self is thus the goal towards which he strives. This self of his, however, is not an abstraction but is absolutely concrete. In the movement towards himself the individual cannot relate himself negatively towards his environment, for if he were to do so his self is an abstraction and remains such.

And so the ethical life, far from being the dreary duty-factory the aesthete fears, turns out to be the only life that is genuinely beautiful:

Therefore, only when I regard life ethically do I see it with a view to its beauty, and only when I regard my own life ethically do I see it with a view to its beauty.

Everything comes back. Everything the aesthete loved — beauty, pleasure, particularity, freedom — returns in the ethical life. But it returns transfigured, owned, made real:

Everything comes back, but comes back transfigured. Therefore, only when one regards life ethically does it acquire beauty, truth, significance, firm consistence.

---

The Ethical Life in Practice

After hundreds of pages of philosophical architecture — choice, despair, the self, the universal — Judge William finally comes down from the heights. He rolls up his sleeves. What does the ethical life actually look like on a Tuesday morning? What does it feel like to have a job, a friend, a wife, a calling? This closing stretch of the second letter is where the Judge stops arguing and starts painting.

And the picture he paints is surprisingly warm.

The Beauty of Ordinary Life

The section opens with one of the Judge’s most striking declarations. Where the aesthete needs to travel, to chase, to appraise beauty and reject what falls short, the ethical person simply looks out a window:

When I regard life ethically I regard it with a view to its beauty; life then to me becomes rich in beauty, not poor in beauty as it really is for you. I do not need to travel all over the land to discover beauties, nor to follow them up in the streets, I do not need to appraise and reject.

He sees a young girl passing by — the same one A had dismissed as a faded beauty, someone whose love affair went badly and whose looks withered with grief. For the Judge, she has lost nothing. Every person, however insignificant or lowly, carries a kind of inner victory:

I see him as this particular man who is yet at the same time the universal man, I see him as one who has this concrete task in life, he does not exist for the sake of any other person… he has his teleology in himself, he is victorious, he accomplishes this task, that I see; for the man of courage does not see spooks, but on the other hand he sees victorious heroes; the coward does not see heroes but only spooks.

Work, Money, and the Dignity of Making a Living

Now the Judge gets practical — almost comically so. He invents “a hero” who is “like most people” and walks him through the question every person must face: how do I live?

First, the hero consults an aestheticist — a wealthy one, naturally. The advice is blunt and brutal: you need three thousand dollars a year minimum, six thousand if you marry. Money is everything. If you have none? The aestheticist shrugs:

“Well, that’s another matter, then you must be content with going to the workhouse.”

The ethicist, by contrast, offers a single sentence: “It is every man’s duty to work in order to live.” Not glamorous advice. But the Judge argues it contains a profound equality. The aestheticist treats the poor man as an exception, a pitiable case. The ethicist treats the wealthy man as the exception — and not in a flattering way:

Insofar, then, as a man does not need to work he is an exception, but to be an exception is, as we agreed above, not great but little.

What follows is one of the most sustained and beautiful passages in the entire letter — a meditation on what it means to struggle for daily bread. The Judge acknowledges he has never known real poverty himself, but he has watched closely, and what he sees is not degradation but a kind of hidden nobility:

It is beautiful to see the lilies of the field (though they sew not neither do they spin) so clothed that even Solomon in all his glory was not so magnificent… but it is still more beautiful to see a man earning by his work what he has need of.

The argument flips everything on its head. Plants do not spin — but that is not their greatness, it is their limitation. It is precisely because humans must work that they are elevated above nature. “It is an expression of man’s perfection that he can work, it is a still higher expression for it that he must.”

And the struggle itself — even the grinding, inglorious struggle for daily bread — has a beauty the Judge refuses to let anyone diminish:

How much of the spirit of childhood is required in order sometimes almost to smile at all the earthly trouble and travail an immortal spirit has to put up with in order to live, how much humility in order to be content with that little which is earned with difficulty, how much faith in order to see a guidance of providence in one’s own life too; for it is easy enough to say that God is greatest in the least manifestations, but to see Him in them requires the strongest faith!

The man who fights for daily bread has no audience, no applause, no gallery of maidens watching from the balcony. His combat is invisible. But his imagined soliloquy is one of the most moving passages the Judge produces:

“When I was twenty years of age, I too dreamed of combat, I imagined myself in the lists, I looked up at the balcony, I saw the circle of maidens, saw them anxious on my behalf, saw them wave to me their applause, and I forgot the toil of the combat; now I have grown older, my combat is now a different one, but my soul is not less proud. I demand another umpire, a connoisseur, I demand an eye which seeth in secret, which doth not grow weary of seeing, which beholds the strife and perceives the danger.”

Vocation: Every Man Has a Calling

The hero needs more than just “work.” He needs a reason for the work, a way to understand it as something other than drudgery. Again, the aestheticists fail him. One tells him to discover an “aristocratic talent” and cultivate it like a prancing steed. Another says work is simply life’s “seamy side” — get it over with in five hours and live in the remaining twelve.

The ethicist cuts through all of it: “It is every man’s duty to have a calling.”

This is not the same as saying everyone has a talent. Talents create hierarchies — some have them, most do not, and the line between the two is always arbitrary. A calling is universal. It is the ethical transfiguration of whatever work you happen to do:

Every man has a calling. The most eminent talent is a calling, and the individual who is in possession of it cannot lose sight of reality… The most insignificant individual has a calling, he shall not be cast out, not be reduced to living on a par with the beasts, he does not stand outside of the universal human, he has a calling.

The difference matters enormously. When talent is understood only as talent — as raw aesthetic force — it becomes “absolutely egoistic,” a robber existence with no higher expression. Every talent wants to be the center; two talents in the same person wage civil war. But when talent is understood as a calling, it finds its place within the whole:

“If my calling is an insignificant one, I can be faithful to my calling and am essentially just as great as the greatest, without being for an instant so foolish as to forget the differences… If my calling is insignificant, I can be unfaithful to my calling, and if I am, I commit just as great a sin as does the greatest.”

And then the Judge adds a quiet, almost offhand observation that turns out to be one of his sharpest. Think of the beech tree. It grows, forms its crown of leaves. If it were to become impatient and say, “Here in this place where I stand there hardly ever comes a living being. What use is it for me to grow?” — it would only delay its own growth. And perhaps a traveler would pass and say, “If this tree instead of being stunted had been a leafy tree, I now might have taken rest in its shade.”

Do your job. Whether anyone notices is not your department.

Marriage, the Ordinary Girl, and the Extraordinary

Having established work and calling, the Judge steers the hero — inevitably, hilariously — toward marriage. He knows his young aesthetic friend will groan at this. And he plays the comedy perfectly:

You already shudder at my prosaic intention, for you say, “Now it comes to nothing less than getting him married; yes, do be so kind, you had better have his banns published.”

A insists that a man must marry an extraordinary girl — a nymph from the forest, a being of singular beauty. The Judge plays along. Fine, let her appear. Let the hero win her. But watch what happens: the hero starts to feel that marriage itself would degrade such a love. Would it not be presumptuous to enter “the great company of wedded people” when their love is so unique?

This is precisely the trap. The ethical teaches that the relationship itself is the absolute — not the differences between this partner and that one. The extraordinary girl is a snare because she makes you fall in love with the exception rather than the universal:

It deprives him of the vain joy of being the extraordinary in order to give him the true joy of being the universal. It brings him into harmony with existence as a whole.

And then the Judge delivers the punchline. The hero does not get the nymph. He gets an ordinary girl, “like most girls.” And he is delighted:

“The relationship after all is the absolute.” More firmly than of anything else he is convinced that the relationship will have power to develop this ordinary girl into everything great and beautiful; his wife in all humility is of the same opinion. Yea, my young friend, the way of the world is strange; I did not in the least believe that there existed in the world a marvelous maiden such as you talk about, and now I am ashamed almost of my incredulity, for this ordinary girl with her great faith is a marvelous maiden, and her faith is more precious than gold or green forests.

Friendship and Becoming Revealed

Late in the letter, the Judge turns to friendship — and places it, surprisingly, after marriage. His reasoning: friendship belongs to the ethically mature. Those who seek it too young often abandon it when love arrives. Those who seek it after failed loves are using it as a consolation prize. The best friendships emerge from people already settled in themselves.

The foundation of true friendship is not mysterious sympathy or intellectual excitement but something more durable:

The absolute condition for friendship is agreement in a moral view.

Without this, friendship becomes like the love birds “whose solidarity is so heart-felt that the death of one is also the death of the other” — beautiful in nature, unseemly in the world of spirit. With a shared moral view, friendship endures even death: “the transfigured friend lives on in the other.”

And this leads to what the Judge calls the underlying principle of everything he has argued: “It is every man’s duty to become revealed.” Not hidden, not mysterious, not playing at depth by withholding. The aesthete always keeps something back; the ethical person gives himself totally. Those who refuse to become revealed, who play hide and seek with life, end up enigmatical not just to others but to themselves.

He who will not contend with realities gets phantoms to fight with.

The Extraordinary Man

Near the very end, the Judge addresses a question that has been hovering over the entire letter: what about the person who genuinely cannot realize the universal? Who finds that some part of ordinary human life is simply closed to them?

His answer is careful and deeply felt. The truly extraordinary man, he says, “is the truly ordinary man. The more of the universal-human an individual is able to realize in his life, the more extraordinary he is.” Those who rush to claim the title of exception — who are glad to find themselves outside the norm — are like nightingales proud of a single red feather.

But if someone discovers, through honest struggle, that they cannot realize the universal in some respect, they must not be flippant about it. They must grieve:

“I love the universal, nevertheless. If it was the happy lot of the others to bear witness to the universal by the fact that they realized it, well then, I bear witness to it by my sorrow.”

And that sorrow itself becomes “an expression of the universal human, a movement of its heart within him, and it will bring about his reconciliation with it.”

What they lose in breadth they may gain in depth. And every person, the Judge concludes, is in some sense both: “every man is the universal-human and at the same time an exception.”

The Judge’s Testimony and Farewell

The letter’s closing pages drop all argumentation. The Judge simply testifies — offers his own life as evidence:

I perform my duties as judge assessor, I am glad to have such a calling, I believe it is in keeping with my faculties and with my whole personality… I love my wife and am happy in my home; I hear my wife’s lullaby, and it appears to me more beautiful than any other song… I see his elder brother growing up and being promoted in school, I contemplate his future joyfully and confidently… I love my fatherland, and I cannot well imagine that I could thrive in any other land. I love my mother-tongue which liberates my thought… Thus my life has significance for me, so much so that I feel joyful and content with it.

It is almost unbearably simple. No philosophical fireworks, no dialectical maneuvering. Just a man describing his actual life and finding it good. He acknowledges that this testimony may even hurt the young aesthete to hear — “that life in its simplicity may be so beautiful.” But he offers it anyway, with one claim: “it has one quality which your life unfortunately lacks — trustworthiness. You can build upon it securely.”

He sends greetings from his wife, who is fond of A but sees his weakness clearly: “She affirms that in your pride you appraise all men and reject them.” The Judge defends his young friend — it is not cruelty but restlessness, the soul’s infinite aspiration making him unfair to finite people. But there is a warning embedded in the warmth:

There comes an instant when it is a question of really beginning to live, and it is a perilous thing to have so dispersed oneself that it becomes a matter of the greatest difficulty to collect oneself.

And then, quietly, the Judge announces what comes next. He has received a sermon from a pastor friend in Jutland — a man who prepares his sermons walking the open heath, where “my eye discovers not a single soul, where my voice lifts itself with all its strength to outdo the violence of the storm.” He sends the manuscript along. Not to discuss it, not to argue about it. Just to let it do its work in a quiet hour.

The letter ends as it must — with a farewell that is also an invitation to keep coming for dinner.

---

The Ultimatum

The entire architecture of Either/Or — the aesthete’s brilliant evasions, the Judge’s patient ethical arguments — leads to this: a short sermon by a country parson on the Jutland heath. Not written by Judge William himself. Forwarded. The ethical thinker, for all his eloquence across hundreds of pages, reaches a threshold he cannot cross on his own. He hands the letter over and says, in effect: this man said what I wanted to say, better than I could.

The Judge’s cover note is disarming in its modesty. He describes his old friend — a “little man with a squarely built figure, merry, light-hearted and uncommonly jovial,” who scraped through his theology exams and was posted to a tiny parish on the heath. The Judge tells his young aesthete friend: “In this sermon he has apprehended what I said to you and also what I was desirous of saying. He has expressed it more felicitously than I find myself capable of doing.” Then the quiet instruction: “Take it then, read it, I have nothing to add, except that I have read it and thought of myself — read it then and think of yourself.”

The Sermon: As Against God We Are Always in the Wrong

The sermon’s title sounds like a punishment. The parson’s argument is that it is a liberation.

He begins with the destruction of Jerusalem — Christ weeping over the city, the righteous perishing alongside the guilty, heaven remaining shut. The question this raises is ancient and brutal: does it matter, being good? If the innocent share the same fate as the wicked, what is righteousness worth?

The parson dismisses the comfortable evasion — the instinct to say, well, that was two thousand years ago, it will not happen again, we live in peace. He calls this cowardly:

Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world? Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even to the most explicable events?

If it happened once, it can happen again. If innocent people were crushed once, the comfortable assurance that goodness will be rewarded is already broken.

The Failure of “One Does What One Can”

Against this vertigo, the parson sets up a straw man — the worldly wisdom that says: relax, God is reasonable, we are weak, one does what one can. He demolishes it with the patience of a man who has heard it too many times.

The problem is that no one actually knows what “one can” do. In the moments that matter — when you are stretched to breaking, when the people you trusted are falling — the phrase dissolves:

Were you never in such danger that almost in despair you exerted your strength to the utmost and yet ardently wished you could do more? And perhaps another man was watching you with a dubious and beseeching look, wondering if you might not do more.

And then the deeper cut:

Did you never sense this dread? For if you never sensed it, then do not open your mouth to reply, for you are unable to answer the question here put to you.

Twice in the sermon, the parson uses this formulation — if you have not felt this, you cannot speak to it. It is a remarkable move for a preacher. He is not arguing people into agreement. He is asking whether they have lived enough to recognize what he is describing.

The worldly formula — sometimes right, sometimes wrong, a little of each — cannot ground a relationship to God. A “more or less” cannot reach the infinite. The parson puts it with precision: “Such a relationship to God is no relationship, and it was the nutriment of doubt.”

Love as the Key

Here the sermon turns, and the argument becomes extraordinary.

The parson asks you to imagine someone you love doing you wrong. When it is a stranger, you feel the satisfaction of knowing you are right. But when it is someone you love:

Oh, if you loved him, this thought would not tranquilize you, you would explore anew every possibility. You would not be able to come to any other conclusion but that he was in the wrong, and yet this certainty would disquiet you, you would wish that you might be in the wrong.

When you love someone, being right against them is not a victory. It is a grief. You would rather find yourself mistaken — you would “tear up the reckoning” — than hold the proof of their failure. The deeper the love, the stronger the wish to be wrong.

This is the hinge of the entire sermon. Being wrong before God is not a logical deduction from God’s omnipotence. It is a movement of love:

It was not by the toil of thought you attained this recognition, neither was it forced upon you, for in love one finds oneself in freedom. … From love’s dearest and only wish, that you might always be in the wrong, you reached the apprehension that God was always in the right.

The order matters enormously. You do not start with the proposition “God is always right” and deduce that you must be wrong. You start with love’s wish — the desire to be in the wrong — and from that wish, the recognition of God’s rightness follows freely. One path is compulsion. The other is devotion.

When you recognize that God is always in the right you stand aloof from God, and so, too, when you recognize as a consequence of this that you are always in the wrong. On the other hand, if in virtue of no foregoing recognition you claim and are convinced that you are always in the wrong, then you are hidden in God. This is your divine worship, your religious devotion, your godly fear.

Not Resignation but Joy

The parson anticipates the objection: does this not produce numbness? If you are always wrong, why bother acting at all? He answers with the analogy already established — the person who wished to be wrong before the one they loved, were they dull and inactive? Did they not do everything in their power?

The thought that we are always in the wrong before God is not a sedative. It is the recognition that God’s love is greater than ours. And that recognition is animating, not paralyzing:

So when your only wish is denied to you, my hearer, you are joyful nevertheless; you do not say, “God is always in the right,” for in that there is no joy; you say, “Against God I am always in the wrong.”

The parson builds to a crescendo — even when you must deny yourself your dearest wish, even when you lose not only your joy but your honor, even when you knock and it is not opened, seek and do not find, plant and water and see no blessing — “you are joyful in your work nevertheless, for against God we are always in the wrong.”

The Final Question

The sermon ends not with a declaration but a question. The parson asks his hearers — and through Judge William’s cover letter, asks the young aesthete A — whether they could wish it otherwise:

Could you wish that that beautiful law which for thousands of years has supported the race and every generation in the race, that beautiful law, more glorious than the law which supports the stars in their courses upon the vault of heaven, could you wish that this law might burst, with more dreadful effect than if that law of nature were to lose its force and everything were to be resolved into horrid chaos?

He does not threaten. “I have no word of wrath with which to terrify you; your wish must not proceed from dread.” He simply asks. And the final sentence of the entire book — the last words of Either/Or — carries the weight of everything that came before:

Ask yourself, and continue to ask until you find the answer; for one may have known a thing many times and acknowledged it, one may have willed a thing many times and attempted it, and yet it is only by the deep inward movements, only by the indescribable emotions of the heart, that for the first time you are convinced that what you have known belongs to you, that no power can take it from you; for only the truth which edifies is truth for you.

Why the Book Ends Here

The placement is deliberate and devastating. The aesthete A filled Volume One with brilliance, irony, seduction, music criticism, philosophical wit. Judge William spent Volume Two building the case for the ethical life — marriage, duty, choosing oneself. And then, at the very end, the Judge steps aside. He cannot make the final argument. He sends a sermon by someone else — a man with no intellectual pretensions, walking a heath, shouting into the wind.

The “ultimatum” is not the Judge’s. It comes from beyond the ethical sphere entirely. What the Judge has been groping toward — that the self must be grounded in something absolute — the parson states simply: you are always in the wrong before God, and this is not a punishment but a form of love so complete that it resolves every doubt the ethical life cannot settle on its own.

The aesthete built a life on the premise that nothing matters enough to commit to. The Judge built a life on the premise that commitment itself — choosing, willing, persisting — is the ground of selfhood. The parson suggests that even this is not enough. The ground is not your choice. The ground is a love so total that being wrong within it is better than being right outside it.

Either/Or ends, then, not with an answer but with a question and an invitation. The parson does not compel. He asks: could you wish it otherwise? The book closes on that open chord — still vibrating, still unresolved, waiting for the reader’s own “deep inward movements” to complete it.

---

Claude’s Take

This is one of the great books of the nineteenth century, and it is also, in places, a slog. Both things are true and neither cancels the other.

What works brilliantly: the second letter, “Equilibrium,” is one of the most sustained and penetrating pieces of philosophical writing in any language. The passage from the midnight hour through the ship metaphor to “choose despair” to “choosing oneself in eternal validity” is a philosophical argument that reads like a thriller. The character study of the aesthete — the three-day horse race, the morbid heat, the hovering above existence — is as psychologically acute as anything in Dostoevsky, and it came first. The concept of repentance as radical self-acceptance rather than guilt is an idea that still has not fully landed in popular culture, 180 years later. And the closing sermon is a genuine masterpiece in miniature — the argument from love, the distinction between deducing your wrongness and wishing it, the final open question. It earns its placement as the last word.

What creaks: the first letter on marriage. Lowrie was right — it is often tedious, repetitive, and badly organized. The Judge makes his central point (marriage preserves and deepens first love rather than destroying it) in the first thirty pages and then spends another hundred and fifty making it again from slightly different angles. The comic set pieces (the government official, the imaginary castle) are excellent, but they are islands in a sea of restated arguments. A ruthless editor could cut the marriage letter by a third and lose nothing.

The translation itself is dated but serviceable. Lowrie’s English has a Victorian formality that sometimes obscures Kierkegaard’s wit. The OCR artifacts in this edition are occasionally distracting. But the substance comes through.

Who should read this: anyone who has ever felt paralyzed by options. Anyone who suspects that keeping all doors open is itself a kind of trap. Anyone interested in the philosophical roots of existentialism — this is where it starts, before Heidegger, before Sartre, before all the French cafes. The book is also essential for understanding Kierkegaard’s later work: the three spheres of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious) that structure everything from Fear and Trembling to The Sickness Unto Death are all laid out here for the first time.

The relationship between the two volumes is what makes Either/Or matter as a whole. Volume One without Volume Two is dazzling but empty — a fireworks display. Volume Two without Volume One is earnest but preachy — a sermon without an occasion. Together they form something rare: a book that dramatizes a philosophical argument rather than merely stating it. You do not just read about the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical. You feel the pull of both.

Claude Score: 8/10. A point docked for the first letter’s repetitiveness and a point for the translation’s age. But the philosophical core — the ship metaphor, the theory of self-choice, the distinction between doubt and despair, the closing sermon — is as powerful now as it was in 1843. This is not a book you finish. It is a book that finishes you.