I argue that “The Rotation of Crops” represents one of two culminations of the aesthete’s (i.e., “A’s”) position in Either/Or. Under the guise of his bantering remarks, A sketches a theory of the modern self as specifically constituted in relation to the problem of boredom: To be modern is to be bored and to be motivated by the desire not to be bored. A’s boredom is thus in some sense an experience of ultimate significance, a religious experience imminent within the terms of the secular life itself. A’s solution to the problem of boredom turns out therefore to require a wholesale conversion; the cure is nothing short of a totalizing spiritual practice that one must make the center of one’s life, if one hopes to keep things interesting. A’s position amounts at once to a transcendental critique and to a theology of boredom.

In Either/Or I, the aesthete, A, gives us the following diagnosis of his predicament: “I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything.” In this chapter, I explore A’s fascinating claim that knowledge requires courage by way of juxtaposing the aesthetic life with Cartesian skeptical doubt. I show that just as the Cartesian doubter seeks refuge from radical skepticism in the safety of introspective knowledge – what is directly present to consciousness – so the aesthete seeks solace in the moment and what is sensuously present to him. Both methods ultimately prove ineffective and spurious, however: Cartesian introspection imprisons us in a mental cage with no beyond, just as aestheticism holds us captive in a self-spun world where our self dissolves. Consequently, what both the aesthete and the Cartesian need to do is to develop the strength to confront and overcome the anxieties that have motivated the flight from “the outer” (the flight from the world) in the first place.

Time, and how we relate to it, is a persistent theme throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Particularly striking is the way in which Kierkegaard depicts various pathologies of temporal experience, showing how various strategies for dealing with time are ultimately self-defeating. Either/Or is perhaps the single best example of a text in which Kierkegaard problematizes time and our responses to it. The book is famously presented as staging a clash between two views of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. But it can also be understood as presenting and critiquing two different ways of relating to time: one that tries to evade the responsibility entailed by living in time and one that tries to anchor itself in an eternity that is ultimately a denial of finitude. The text suggests both approaches to time are doomed, and that a different, specifically religious relation to time is required.

In this chapter, we argue that a distinct concept of “aesthetic hope” emerges from the way Kierkegaard’s Aesthete treats hope [Haab] and its relationship to recollection [Erindring] in “The Unhappiest One” and “Rotation of Crops.” We first show that aesthetic hope is distinct from the two other kinds of hope discussed by Kierkegaard: temporal hope and eternal hope. We then consider the suggestion that aesthetic hope is also an expression of despair – an inverse hope against hope, which seeks to avoid disappointment by hoping for things that are in some sense certain. The aesthete’s recommendation that we hope in such a way illuminates Kierkegaard’s view of the “dialectic” of temporal hope and eternal hope. Finally, we explore the treatment of hope in Either/Or as essentially involving a controlled, attentional element that anticipates some contemporary trends in the philosophy of hope.

This chapter explores Judge William’s argument that ethical marriage is superior to aesthetic ways of living. William’s argument serves as a response to the method A sketches out in his essay on crop rotation, by explaining how the various concerns that motivate A’s program for avoiding boredom are more fully addressed by the marriage relationship. And yet, deeper examination of William’s argument reveals how this view of marriage is itself incomplete. Incidentally, it is A’s review essay on “The First Love” that demonstrates how a proper appreciation for “the occasion” helps protect romantic partners, in both aesthetic and ethical relationships, from falling into delusion about the status of their relationship. William’s account of marriage seems to ignore this problem, but with the importance of the occasion in mind we can understand what a fuller, more meaningful romantic relationship could be like.

This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

Kierkegaard’s aesthete, named only as A, continually laments the lack of meaning in his life. He suffers through passions that flare up and quickly die away, leaving him in a melancholic state. His mode of being is on display in the Diapsalmata, the fragmentary writings at the start of Either/Or. In this chapter, we examine why he avoids becoming consistently engaged in the world and remains trapped within his alienated melancholia. We offer a general account of melancholy, arguing that melancholia is an existential condition that must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of possibility. We also provide a sympathetic interpretation of A’s melancholy, rather than placing blame upon him, because melancholia attunes us to certain aspects of the world and of human existence. The aesthetic life has epistemic, moral, and aesthetic worth on its own terms, so a person may legitimately decide to remain melancholic. This avoids compromising our possibilities, makes us receptive to the suffering of others, and may inspire creative activity such as writing poetical fragments.

Judge William of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or claims that the Jutland Pastor’s sermon expresses exactly what he had tried to say in his letters. This is far from obvious to the reader, and I suggest we bypass the Judge, reading the sermon directly with A’s essays on unhappy love and tragedy. Like the sermon, Part I’s “Shadowgraphs” deals with the psychology of persons who have (apparently) been wronged by someone they love and the defenses they construct on the beloved’s behalf mimic classic theodicies. The Pastor’s “practical theodicy,” which consists in thinking of ourselves as the wrongdoers, can be applied to their predicament as well. Yet imagining what that would mean in an abusive interpersonal relationship shows how perilous the Pastor’s theodicy is, alienating us from our own ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. A’s treatment of tragedy offers an alternative. Recognizing that God (or the beloved) is indifferent or simply evil restores our moral-emotional integrity.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

In this essay, we survey the history of Either/Or’s English language reception in order to contextualize the importance of the Critical Guide’s contribution to current discussions of Kierkegaard.

What are we to make of the sermon at the end of Either/Or? How does it stand in relation to the book’s preceding presentations of aesthetic and ethical life? Why is it presented under the title, “Ultimatum”? This chapter takes up these questions by showing how the sermon, and the fictional Jutland priest to whom it is attributed, serve to represent a certain development within ethical subjectivity. On the reading I develop, the sermon represents, namely, a way of trying to sustain a stance of participation in ethical life, in the face of experiences of human powerlessness and exposure to tragedy, without despair but also without succumbing to illusions of ethical independence. So understood, the sermon offers a perspective that, while it incorporates elements of both, provides a third alternative to the tragic outlook of “A” in Either/Or’s Volume 1 and the letters of Judge William in Volume 2.

I argue that Either/Or contains a proposal for philosophy of science, and in particular, about the ultimate goal of science (i.e., the ideal epistemic state). Whereas the Cartesian-Hegelian tradition conceived of the ideal state as one of detached reflection – that is, “seeing the world as it is in itself” – the characters in Part I of Either/Or reveal this ideal as leading to practical absurdity. In contrast, Kierkegaard suggests that the ideal state consists in the achievement of equilibrium between the “spectator” and “actor” aspects of the human being. Kierkegaard’s proposal thus sets the stage for Niels Bohr’s “epistemological lesson of quantum theory.”

This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.