Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or EXPLAINED

ELI5/TLDR

Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) asks a deceptively simple question: should you live for pleasure or for duty? He sets up two fictional characters — one chasing desire, the other committed to morality — and lets them argue for 600 pages without either winning. Then he quietly suggests that maybe neither option is enough, and what’s actually needed is a personal, irrational leap of faith. The whole thing was a quiet rebellion against Hegel’s idea that you can build a rational system to explain human existence.

The Full Story

The Setup: Two Ways to Live

Kierkegaard published Either/Or in 1843 under the pseudonym Victor Eremita — Latin for “victorious hermit,” because apparently even his pen names had to be philosophical. The book poses a question that sounds like a dinner party icebreaker but turns out to be bottomless: how should one live?

He offers two options. The aesthetic life is built around pleasure, desire, novelty. The ethical life is built around commitment, duty, moral responsibility. And the title is not a suggestion to blend them. It is called Either/Or, not Both.

The book is structured as a kind of correspondence between two fictional characters, each embodying one of these modes. They write back and forth, each trying to convince the other that their way of living is the correct one.

The Aesthete

The aesthetic character lives for sensation and experience. He chases pleasure the way a shark chases movement — not because he chose to, but because stopping feels like death. The problem is that pleasure has a shelf life. The moment you get what you want, you’re already bored and scanning for the next thing.

Kierkegaard uses Mozart’s Don Giovanni as the poster child for this mode. Don Juan is already fantasizing about his next lover while still with his current one. Boredom is the aesthete’s great enemy — in Kierkegaard’s framing, it is “the root of all evil.” Not greed, not malice. Boredom.

The Ethicist

The second character, Judge Wilhelm, lives according to the ethical mode. He’s the marriage-and-commitment guy. He urges the young aesthete to stop chasing desire and to invest in things that endure — relationships, moral responsibility, the kind of life that doesn’t evaporate the moment the novelty wears off.

Neither character convinces the other. The aesthete thinks the ethicist is boring. The ethicist thinks the aesthete is shallow. After roughly 500 pages of this, the reader is left in genuine ambiguity. Kierkegaard does not hand you an answer. He hands you a tension and walks away.

“If you marry, you will regret it. If you do not marry, you will also regret it. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both.”

That passage — which goes on considerably longer in the same vein — is one of the most famous in the book. It reads like a philosopher having a panic attack in perfectly structured prose. The point is not nihilism. The point is that rational deliberation alone cannot resolve the most important questions of your life.

The Third Option: The Religious

After letting his two characters exhaust themselves, Kierkegaard gestures toward a third mode of existence: the religious. He doesn’t fully develop it in Either/Or — that work happens in Fear and Trembling — but the hint is there. Maybe neither pleasure nor duty is sufficient. Maybe what’s needed is faith. Not faith as institutional religion or Sunday attendance, but a deeply personal, individual relationship with the absolute. Something that cannot be rationally justified.

This is where Kierkegaard gets into the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. Morally, this is monstrous. It violates every ethical principle available. But Abraham does it anyway — not out of pleasure-seeking or moral reasoning, but out of faith. Kierkegaard calls this the “teleological suspension of the ethical”: the idea that faith can override morality in a way that looks insane from the outside but is, for the individual, the only authentic response.

For Kierkegaard, most religious people are not actually living religiously. They’re following the herd. True religious life means standing alone before the absolute, possibly in direct contradiction with what society considers ethical.

Why This Mattered: The Hegel Problem

To understand why Either/Or was a big deal, you need to understand what Kierkegaard was pushing against. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — whose name alone suggests a man who believed in systems — had built the dominant philosophical framework of the era. Hegel’s view was that human history unfolds rationally, that the individual finds freedom by participating in the universal, and that everything (including religion) can be integrated into a grand dialectical process.

Think of it like an architect’s blueprint. Hegel believed you could design a plan for human existence, show it to people, and they’d understand exactly how the house of meaning gets built. It’s objective. It’s systematic. It’s tidy.

Kierkegaard looked at this and, to put it mildly, was not persuaded.

His counter-argument: the question “how should one live?” cannot be answered from the outside. It can only be answered from within. An architect can show you a blueprint. No one can show you a blueprint for your life. The answer is inherently subjective — not because truth doesn’t exist, but because the truths that matter most require your personal commitment. You can’t outsource them to a system.

This distinction between objective truth (facts you can measure) and subjective truth (commitments you must make) is the hinge on which existentialism turns. Every existentialist who came after Kierkegaard — Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus — inherited this basic insight: the question is not what human life should look like in the abstract, but how your life should be lived in particular.

The Cliff

There’s a metaphor Kierkegaard uses in The Concept of Anxiety that the video presenter borrows for Either/Or. You’re standing at the edge of a cliff. You feel fear — the normal kind, tied to the real danger of falling. But you also feel something else: the dizzying awareness that you are free to jump. Not that you want to. Just that you could.

This is what Kierkegaard calls angst. Not fear of a specific threat, but anxiety about the sheer fact of your own freedom. You are free to choose, and that freedom is terrifying, because no system will make the choice for you.

Either/Or won’t tell you how to live. It will, however, make you feel the weight of the fact that you have to decide.

Claude’s Take

This is a competent introductory overview of Either/Or — the kind of thing that genuinely helps someone decide whether to pick up a 600-page book. The presenter covers the main architecture of the work (aesthetic vs. ethical, the hint of the religious, the anti-Hegelian thrust) and does so without butchering the ideas too badly.

A few things to flag. The video consistently refers to Kierkegaard’s concept of “faith” as “fate,” which appears to be either a transcript error or a mispronunciation that propagates throughout. The actual concept is faith — tro in Danish — and the distinction matters enormously, since Kierkegaard’s whole point is that faith is a free act, not something fated or determined.

The comparison to Jung’s shadow concept is the presenter’s own addition and is… fine, in the way that all cross-philosophical analogies are fine if you don’t press too hard. Both involve confronting parts of yourself you’d rather ignore. But the frameworks are different enough that the comparison is more decorative than illuminating.

The video also somewhat undersells the literary dimension of Either/Or. The book is not just a philosophical argument — it’s a work of extraordinary literary craft. The “Seducer’s Diary” section, for instance, is a novella-length piece of fiction that works as both philosophy and literature. The pseudonymous structure is not a gimmick; it’s the method. Kierkegaard doesn’t argue for a position — he inhabits positions through characters, which is why the book refuses to resolve. Mentioning this would have elevated the video from “decent summary” to “actually gets what makes the book distinctive.”

On the whole, though, this does what it sets out to do. If you’ve never read Kierkegaard and want to know whether Either/Or is worth your time: yes, and this video gives you an honest preview of what you’re getting into.