The Seducer’s Diary

Johannes — young, philosophical, and completely absorbed in his own interiority — has fallen in love with the project of falling in love with Cordelia, with the careful cultivation of a situation that will culminate, inevitably, in her complete surrender — and her abandonment. Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary, embedded in the first volume of Either/Or, is simultaneously a disturbing portrait of a predatory male mind and a philosophical inquiry into the difference between aesthetic and ethical modes of existence.

That it is also genuinely compelling as narrative — Johannes is an unreliable narrator of supreme sophistication, and the diary form creates exactly the claustrophobic intimacy the story requires — is what makes it more than a philosophical exercise. Kierkegaard understood that the most damning portrait of a consciousness is one that presents itself, in good faith, as its own advocate.

Essential Kierkegaard in a Penguin Little Black Classic — one of philosophy’s most challenging and most rewarding texts in a beautiful pocket edition. Published by Penguin.