On Either/Or

This took far longer to finish than I expected. It had been on my list a long time, but I finally picked it up at the start of the year after seeing a Reddit thread asking which books might “cure” depression — someone recommended Either/Or, and I decided it was time. It did not cure my depression. It did force me to think seriously about my own life.

Kierkegaard frames the book as an outside, pseudonymous editor who claims to have found the texts within it; we clever readers know he wrote them himself. The book runs on two perspectives. The first volume, “Either,” is a treatment of aesthetics from the viewpoint of a man who lives only for enjoyment — today we might call him a gourmand, or even a “fuck boy,” though he isn’t really interested in sex at all. What consumes him is sentimentality as a means of escaping boredom, and much of the volume is a philosophical examination of the art forms, with Mozart’s “Don Juan” getting the most space. Its final section is the viewpoint of a man named Johannes pursuing his romantic interest, Cordelia; the moment he has her, he loses interest and moves on. The second volume, “Or,” comes from a Judge Vilhelm and is mostly two long letters to Johannes, followed by a sermon from someone else — the first letter about commitment, especially marriage, the second about doubt and despair.

Since we know Kierkegaard wrote all of it, he’s trying to tell us something. Post-Hegelian that he is, he plays with dialectics: on one side the aesthetic life, in Johannes, on the other the ethical life, in Judge Vilhelm. They collide, and it’s left to the reader to tease out the contradictions in each — though I’m not sure I’m trained well enough in dialectics to do it properly. Still, I learned a lot. I went in assuming I’d have more in common with Judge Vilhelm, since I have little trouble with commitment and didn’t think aesthetics mattered to me. Kierkegaard disabused me of that, and I suspect he identified with Johannes for a good part of his own life.

One thing I struggle with is despair. Kierkegaard, as Vilhelm, argues that despair is the result of not being who you are, and that the way out is to commit to something beyond yourself — which needs some unpacking. I think I speak for a lot of us: we try on different hats, different roles. That’s the aesthetic life — “I could be a doctor or a lawyer, it makes no difference” — and then the aesthete tries the role on, finds it doesn’t fit, and backs out for the next one. The ethical life requires committing to a single thing: I will be a doctor, no ifs or buts. And Kierkegaard spends real time on the “ifs.” One feature of the person who despairs — me — is that the despair is self-imposed through conditional statements: I’d be happy if only I had a lot of money, if only I had more time for my interests, if only the world weren’t as it is. That, he says, is a sure road into despair, because we set the bar too high with conditions outside ourselves. Happiness requires conditions we impose on ourselves, not on the world — “if I engaged more closely with my community, then I’d be happy.” The structure of the sentence changes entirely.

Much of this is echoed in modern psychotherapy. Living out of line with our deeper values is a kind of fragmentation (a Jungian would call for individuation; another therapist, for living according to one’s values), and transforming the conditionals is a classic move in cognitive behavioral therapy, which has its roots in Stoicism. So much of it should be self-evident, and yet it isn’t: we see these things clearly in other people and find it remarkably hard to see them in ourselves. My own despair really does come from not knowing how to live, so that I think my way through every possibility and none seems appealing enough, until it feels there’s no way out, that I’ll circle like this forever. What’s needed is what we might call — though Kierkegaard doesn’t — a leap of faith. The ground may be shaky; it doesn’t matter. It’s the leap that matters, and it requires action rather than endless rumination.

One last thing: there’s a section in “Either” on the difference between “pain” and “sorrow.” Pain is felt by everyone; normally you feel it and let it go. Sorrow comes when we turn our pain over and over on an unending loop. He discusses Sophocles’ Antigone here, and how sorrow troubled the ancients less than it troubles us moderns: because free will makes us fully responsible for our actions, whereas the Greeks, believing in fate, didn’t have to carry “regret” as we do. There’s something powerfully Nietzschean in that — eternal recurrence and amor fati as a way out of despair.

I’m so glad I read this. I might once have been more like Judge Vilhelm, back when I was working on my dissertation, but I no longer think I am. Since leaving my program I don’t know what to commit to. But I suppose it doesn’t matter: it isn’t the thing itself that counts, but the commitment.