164. Cf. Ibid., I:202; Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 3/3684, X3 A 431, n.d., 1850.
165. E.g., Kierkegaard, Point of View, 12 n. 32. This phrase itself acted as an indirect critique of the institution of ordinancy in the Danish state church. For a more extensive discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of authority and its relation to existence-communication in ethico-religious matters, see Whittaker, “Kierkegaard on the Concept of Authority,” 83–101; Cf. Kierkegaard’s understanding of “witnessing.” See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1/670, X1 A 235, n.d., 1849.
166. To use an example from modern day Christianity, we can see the problems of such direct communication of Christianity when a speaker gives a direct invitation to another person. The minister says, “Christ stands at the door of your heart: repent and believe! Put up your hand; come up the front and declare Jesus as your own personal savior!” and the church-goer feels a quickening of his heart, tears in his eyes, and submits to this invitation. If the minister is not commissioned by the spirit of God, then these symptoms are merely outwardness and have no correlation to the inward work of God within the individual.
167. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 42–43. As he helpfully illustrates elsewhere, if a person is starving to death but their mouth is so full of food that she cannot eat, the first thing to do is not to give her more food but rather to remove the food in her mouth. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 275.
168. We shall explore this strategy further below in 2.1.
169. This can be seen most clearly in his discussion of subjectivity in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For example, “objective thinking invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers, subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result, partly because this belongs to him, since he possesses the way, partly because he as existing is continually in the process of becoming, as is every human being who has not permitted himself to be tricked into becoming objective, into inhumanly becoming speculative thought” (73).
170. See also “§ 3: The Impossibility of Direct Communication,” in Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 133–36.
1.2 “The Single Individual”
Introduction
Kierkegaard’s corrective to his outwardly driven society was to emphasize the absolute claim that Christianity makes on each and every person inwardly. This point was summed up in Kierkegaard’s phrase “the single individual,” which constituted the key concept for Kierkegaard’s reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom. We will explore this concept and how it was used as a contextual corrective by Kierkegaard. Out of this understanding of Kierkegaard’s view of a human person, we will then consider a critique frequently made of Kierkegaard because of his concept of “the single individual”: the critique of individualism.
“The Single Individual”: A Contextual Response
It is important to note that Kierkegaard’s authorship and its accompanying concepts were not an absolute and definitive account of what he believed or understood. His works were always in response to the context in which he found himself. Much like Wittgenstein, who believed that philosophy was a tool to use in relation to something and not a goal or thing per se, Kierkegaard’s thought cannot be removed from that with which he was concerned, i.e., the realization of “the single individual.”171 Therefore one should not be too quick to judge Kierkegaard as being overly individualistic, with no place for human interrelations and society—his work was a polemic corrective for the “mob mentality” that plagued his Copenhagen.172 But more than this, Kierkegaard anticipated such critiques and attempted to address them within his work.
As George Pattison helpfully articulates, “Kierkegaard is not just a debating partner for Hegel and Co.”173 That is, Kierkegaard did not merely isolate himself within the concerns and conversations of academic philosophers, but sought to dialogue with a raft of popular literature and art in an attempt to address the concerns of the public. He commented on popular novels, plays, actors, and music, as well as the latest and most influential philosophical works. Pattison calls him a “feuilleton writer”: one who was concerned with reflecting on popular culture in the hope of influencing it.174 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Kierkegaard was concerned with the lack of inward reflection that characterized his society, and sought to redirect his fellow Danes away from the distractions of outwardness and toward a consideration of their own lives as individuals. Kierkegaard’s ultimate desire was evangelistic—for his reader to meet God in the “hidden inwardness” of her own heart—but this was not immediately achievable for him, as we shall see. So instead, as a first and necessary step, he sought to awaken “the single individual” apart from “the crowd.”
Such a task was not therefore an attempt at a universally viable philosophical system, but arose out of a perceived need. Kierkegaard’s “single individual” is thus a deeply contextual tool which was the product of its time, and should be considered as such.
“The Single Individual”: A Dialectic of Being
The key idea of “the single individual” was fundamental to Kierkegaard’s entire task, as he saw this as the true reality of what a human being was, as opposed to “one” who was swallowed up in anonymity and the untruth of “the crowd.” “The single individual” was a person who had been stripped of this illusion of Christendom and was free to take responsibility for her own existence. Johannes Climacus’ argument for the importance of subjectivity, ethics and the need for others to take note of their own existence is therefore an argument for “the single individual.”175 But Murray Rae notes that for Kierkegaard, “the single individual” is never autonomous, as if a human being could know truth within herself, but she is always “the single individual” before God.176 Therefore, such attempts at greatness by an individual’s own efforts is possible for an unbeliever like Climacus, but utterly antithetical to Kierkegaard the Christian. A casual (mis-)reading of the earlier pseudonymous works177 can lead to an emphasis on “the single individual” as being apart from societal conventions, but to remain here is to miss the point of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole.178
This is particularly the case with the work by the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio. This pseudonym was likely created by Kierkegaard to be a person who believed in God, but such a knowledge was primarily through the ethical.179 This is why he repeatedly states that he cannot understand Abraham; from his own human capacity (i.e., without the eyes of faith), he elevates Abraham to be an unreachable figure, far above the possibility of emulation by others.180 Such a presentation can therefore lend a casual surface-level reader to dismiss the story as an irrelevant impossibility.
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