Chapter 22: Sociological Categories and the Journey to Selfhood
22
Sociological Categories and the Journey to Selfhood
From the Crowd to Community
In a supplement to The Point of View, Kierkegaard makes clear the essential problem: “In these times, everything is politics.”1138 While the political situation in Denmark is firmly in his mind, for Kierkegaard the political sphere is not simply rooted in the inner workings of the state, but rather in a focus on immediacy, on the outward, physical, animal nature of human existence. Politics has no regard for interiority, and therefore no concern for the individual. Throughout his writings, there is clearly no theme greater than that of the “single individual,” and Kierkegaard’s purpose is resolutely to draw people into isolation before God. Indeed, Kierkegaard argues that God is so uninterested in politics that, in comparison to the internal movement of the individual,1139 he would consider war on a global scale simply “some nonsense we human beings cook up among ourselves,”1140 a “rummaging in the finite world.”1141 Where the religious is concerned with the relationship of the individual to God, the political “begins on earth in order to remain on earth.”1142
When one unites such considerations with that most famous of phrases, “truth is subjectivity,” it is not surprising that Kierkegaard has been considered by so many to be irrational, acosmic, and somewhat nihilistic toward concrete social relationships.1143 The aim of this chapter is not to argue for Kierkegaard as a “communitarian” per se, but to consider whether Kierkegaard does entertain a notion of “authentic” community in addition to the individual. To establish such “authenticity” is to ask whether, for Kierkegaard, a community can exist here and now within the religious category used by God in the service of the eternal, or whether it remains a political entity that simply exists as a consequence of human life to which the redeemed, single individual is either indifferent or opposed.
To this end, the essay will consider the dynamic relationship we find between the categories of the crowd, individual, and community, and argue that while the individual must be drawn out from the crowd, for the sake of their relationship to the eternal they must make a second movement into the community. Space will not allow this investigation to draw upon Kierkegaard’s final attack and its complex relationship with his earlier work.1144 It will rather limit itself predominantly to the pseudonymous writings of Kierkegaard’s first authorship, with a particular focus on A Literary Review and its description of an authentic “life-view.”
From the Crowd to the Single Individual
The single individual is the person who overcomes all manner of evasion, self-deception, and earthly comfort, and stands before God in fearful honesty.1145 It is no surprise, therefore, that one of the central motifs of Kierkegaard’s writing is that of confession. For in the silence of confession,1146 the individual recognizes their identity as sinner, and the infinite qualitative difference between themselves and God.1147 Kierkegaard’s work clearly emphasizes the proverbial advice that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”1148 However, it is not simply the voice of God that one fears in confession, but rather also one’s own insuppressible voice that speaks through the silence. Alone to himself, the individual acts as his own witness, plaintiff, and judge, and holds the keys to his own annihilation.1149 As Kierkegaard makes clear, “There is no one who accuses except one’s thoughts.”1150
However, through the silence of confession this “holy fear” is combined with a blessedness that together create both wonder and worship,1151 because in meeting oneself, one meets God. Through this disposition toward one’s sinfulness and hopelessness, one comes to a realization of the central anthropological principle: “To need God is a human being’s highest perfection.”1152 It is only from a recognition of this principle that an individual may come to know itself, God, and enter into authentic relationship with both. As Kierkegaard clarifies,
Just as knowing oneself in one’s own nothingness is the condition for knowing God, so knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God’s assistance and according to his intention. Wherever God is in truth, there he is always creating.1153
For this reason, as Anti-Climacus makes clear in The Sickness Unto Death, Christianity begins “with making every man [sic] a single individual, an individual sinner.”1154
The Crowd and the Present Age
To become the single individual is a harrowing experience as one is ultimately led to the recognition of oneself as the worst of all sinners.1155 It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that people should do everything to try and avoid it. And the antidote for individuality is “the crowd.” According to Kierkegaard, his suffering at the hands of the Corsair, and the revolution of 1848, were achieved through the creation and use of the crowd, and it is hard to overstate his antagonism toward it. As he makes clear, “The crowd is untruth.”1156 For in the crowd, the individual, the sole recipient of God’s forgiveness, grace, and mercy, is excluded. It is well known that Kierkegaard desired to have as his epitaph, “The Single Individual.”1157 However, Kierkegaard soon extended it to include the surtitle, “The daily press is the state’s disaster, the crowd the world’s evil.”1158 But what are the contours of the crowd according to Kierkegaard?
The Foundation of Fear
No motivation is perhaps greater than a fear of the self. As Kierkegaard describes in The Sickness Unto Death, in the face of one’s identity as spirit, many people choose to lose themselves in immediacy, away from the prying eyes of eternity and the requirement of confession. The easiest way to do this is to “absorb oneself in secular matters,” surround oneself with “the others,” and find security in social homogeneity. Such a person is one who “forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood.”1159 The crowd provides the perfect environment, for here there is neither ultimate responsibility nor conscience.1160 The mob considers its actions to be right because it has the weight of numbers on its side.1161 And even if the crowd were to commit some heinous act, no one feels guilt as no one need take responsibility.1162 A crowd cannot be judged—only individuals.1163 Quite apart from producing internal scrutiny or soul searching, people are allowed to simply “evaporate into the anonymity of the abstract public.”1164 Indeed, as Kierkegaard states, the crowd really isn’t anything but an abstraction or phantom.1165
However, it is not just fear of the self that drives someone into the crowd, but also fear of the crowd itself.1166 Kierkegaard offers his most comprehensive description of the crowd in A Literary Review, where he defines it as the greatest embodiment of the “present age.”1167 In contrast to a truly revolutionary age that can perceive and commit to an idea, the present age exists dialectically. On the one hand it needs to appear to be revolutionary, passionate, bold, and decisive in order to maintain the illusion of seriousness. It therefore needs the concept of the extraordinary.1168 However, on the other hand, it must destroy its actual embodiment in order to avoid the disruption and conviction that such a concept would necessarily entail. Consequently, the present age levels everything out to avoid the distinction and contradiction that undermines its essential status quo. The crowd, therefore, rejects and annihilates anything that undermines its homogeneity and mediocrity.
The crowd is therefore like a criminal protection racket. While it may offer some semblance of peace and protection, one cannot walk away without facing the consequences.1169 The journey to becoming the single individual, therefore, does not simply require overcoming a fear of the self, but equally that of the crowd against which one must stand in all distinctiveness. The easiest move, therefore, is to “mortgage oneself to the crowd”1170—to give in to the age whose gifts include not simply an easy, secure life, free from conscience and existential responsibility1171 and emboldened by anonymity, but also a means through which one’s own personal fear can be channeled and distracted.1172 It is not surprising, therefore, that almost everyone chooses the crowd, and one finds the profound “massification of society,” to use Westphal’s evocative phrase.1173
From the Individual to Community
Kierkegaard’s authorship is clearly committed to drawing the individual out of the sociological category, “the crowd.” However, despite this overwhelming emphasis, Kierkegaard does on occasion turn his mind to a further category, “the community.”1174 As he describes at the turn of 1849,
And insofar as there is the religious “community” or “congregation,” this is a concept which lies on the other side of “the single individual”; “the single individual” must have intervened with ethical decisiveness as the middle term in order to make sure that “community” and “congregation” are not taken in vain as synonymous with public, the crowd etc.; and the familiar fact must still be kept in mind that it is not the single individual’s relationship to the community or congregation which determines his relationship to God, but his relationship to God which determines his relationship to the congregation. Then too, there is—this should be included—the highest relationship of all, in which “the single individual” is absolutely higher than “congregation.” . . . Consequently, from a religious point of view, there is only the single individual (in contrast to “public,” “crowd,” etc., which have their validity politically).1175
This passage is clearly provocative toward our goal. It makes clear that in some way the congregation or community becomes a viable option after the person has become the single individual, and in such a way that their identity as the single individual remains intact. However, the above passage also raises two questions. First, what is the precise identity of this authentic community? It is clearly distinguished from the crowd, which is described as having only political validity. And yet in the same sentence Kierkegaard states that it is only the single individual that is perceivable from the religious point of view. Which domain, therefore, does the authentic community fit into—the religious or political? Second, if the community does not simply fall between these sociological cracks, does Kierkegaard do enough to substantiate it as a real community? We are not talking here of anything so grand as the body of Christ, but for this group to be a community it must be some kind of body.
In order to address these two points, and so to establish whether Kierkegaard does have a legitimate concept of community, this essay will take the following definition as its measure: a valid community is that which exists between two or more people in the service of the individual and is on some level constitutive of the individual. A community is not established simply through the impact of the individual upon others—the duty to love one’s neighbor, for instance, does not do enough in this respect. Rather, it is only when there is mutuality and reciprocity in the service of the eternal that a community may be said to exist—that is, when individuals not only aid others in their identity as individuals, but require the aid of others in their own journey to individuality. This is a base line from which community must be built, as without such a foundation it has neither purpose nor essence, either as a means to an end or an end in itself.1176
To begin our analysis, we will start with a concept that bookends Kierkegaard’s first authorship, and which is sadly often overlooked—the concept of the “life-view.” Here we will find not simply the heart of Kierkegaard’s theory of aesthetics, but also the importance of the human other as a communicator of the religious.
Life-View and the Re-spiratio of Knowledge
One of Kierkegaard’s very first forays into the public eye came at the expense of Hans Christian Anderson. Despite his reputation as a master storyteller and satirist, in From the Papers of One Still Living, published 1838, Kierkegaard argued that Andersen simply projected his own ideology through his stories and lacked a “life-gymnastic,” “world-view,” or “life-view.” For Kierkegaard, a “life-view” is not a creation of speculation and sagacity. Rather, it is gained through the combining of immediate, sensory experience with the reflection of one’s past, to weave a tapestry of understanding from which “an unshakeable certainty in oneself won from all experience” is gained.1177 As such, for one who
does not allow his life to fizzle out too much but seeks as far as possible to lead its single expressions back to himself again, there must necessarily come a moment in which a strange light spreads over life without one’s therefore even remotely needing to have understood all possible particulars, to the progressive understanding of which, however, one now has the key. There must come a moment, I say, when, as Daub observes, life is understood backward through the idea.1178
Through surveying one’s own growing history, one undergoes a “transubstantiation of experience,”1179 which therefore effects one’s perception and engagement with the truth. A certain passivity is implied in allowing that “strange light” to illuminate one’s life. In Kierkegaard’s journals, this is further established as Kierkegaard comments in several places that “all knowing is like breathing, a re-spiratio.”1180 However, this passivity simply reveals the profoundly active responsibility of making oneself receptive to knowledge. Just as a farmer prepares a field but has no control over the seed’s germinating power, so our task is “to do everything in order that [knowledge] can express itself,” through opening one’s life to its experiences.1181
Although each individual will have their own unique life-view drawn through their own experience, it remains a window into the single truth that unites existence. Consequently, when an author writes through their own unique life-view, their work speaks with “an evangelistic tinge,”1182 as it presents something both new and familiar. Such writing reflects something of that universal truth that the reader may already know, and yet reveals it through the writer’s own unique perspective.
In A Literary Review, Kierkegaard draws together many of these thoughts and offers the highest praises for the author of Two Ages (the subject of Kierkegaard’s review), who he believes has written through a highly developed life-view. Kierkegaard describes such an individual as having been “twice-matured”: first by an investment in life and experience, and second by an ability to let this experience work within them.1183 In this way, each story and section of the book is utterly unified by this life-view, and therefore presents a coherent vision of life that has the capacity to “persuade” its reader.1184 Much like the “evangelistic tinge,” such writing effects and develops the reader’s own life-view—not with arguments and conviction, but through a presentation from the shared truth of life.
At the heart of Kierkegaard’s epistemology, therefore, is the belief that the authentic disposition of the individual toward existence will lead to that single truth or idea breaking in, uncorrupted or prejudiced by our own sagacious desires and projections. At its highest this idea is God. As Kierkegaard describes in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, “There are not, as in confusion, different roads and different truths and new truths, but there are many roads leading to the one truth and each person walks his own.”1185 Regardless, therefore, of the theological intentions of the individual, God reveals himself to those who authentically open themselves to a re-spiratio of knowledge. In A Literary Review, therefore, Kierkegaard argues that the author’s work is not the product of natural talent, but rather “the reward God has bestowed on the author, since, twice matured, he has gained something eternal in a life-view.” Through the disposition of “active-passivity,” God has ministered to the author, and developed their life-view such that their work is able to guide others, to act similarly in service to God within other people’s experience. The religious overtones are made explicit as Kierkegaard describes the work as “a resting place or, if you like, a place of prayer, for a certain religious tinge is unmistakable simply because the life-view is not just common sense but common sense mitigated and refined by persuasive feeling and imagination.”1186
The religious dimension is further understood when we consider that this active-passivity is the foundation for confessional silence in all its pregnancy. It is through this same disposition that the individual comes to know themselves and therefore God. These thoughts are further elaborated in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses where Kierkegaard comments, “through that gradual joining of experience to experience which constitutes a good understanding with God, man learns to know God.”1187
The Life-View and the Dialectical Resilience of Community
At the start of A Literary Review, Kierkegaard therefore uses the concept of the life-view and its notion of epistemological respiration to show that within the aesthetic dynamic, those with authentic life-views should influence each other religiously and draw each other toward a shared truth or idea. Near the end of A Literary Review, Kierkegaard elaborates on how this dynamic acts as a foundation for the possibility of genuine interpersonal relationships when he writes,
When the individuals (severally) relate to the same idea, that relation is perfect and normal. The relation singles out individually (each has himself to himself) and unites ideally. In the essential inward directedness there is that modern reticence between man and man that prevents crude assumption. . . . Thus individuals never come too close to one another in the brute sense, just because they are united at an ideal distance. The unanimity of the singled out is the band playing well-orchestrated music together.1188
This position is developed and clarified in a journal entry from 1850, bearing the title, “The Difference between ‘the Crowd,’ ‘the Public’—and Community”:
In the “public” and the like the single individual is nothing; there is no individual. . . . In community, the single individual is; the single individual is dialectically decisive as the presupposition for forming community, and in community the single individual is qualitatively something essential and can at any moment become higher than “community,” specifically, as soon as “the others” fall away from the idea. The cohesiveness of community comes from each one’s being a single individual, and then the idea; the connectedness of a public or rather its disconnectedness consists of the numerical character of everything. Every single individual in community guarantees the community; the public is a chimera. In community the single individual is a microcosm who qualitatively reproduces the cosmos. . . . “Community” is certainly more than a sum, but yet it is truly a sum of ones; the public is nonsense—a sum of negative ones, of ones who are not ones, who become ones through the sum instead of the sum becoming a sum of the ones.1189
For Kierkegaard, the possibility of genuine community begins with the concept of the idea. The idea can be anything. But to be effective it must be able to induce passion and so inwardness, which, at least to some degree, creates individuality. In contrast to the present age, for instance, the revolutionary age may be wild and untamed, but it does at least for Kierkegaard produce those who create themselves existentially through a passionate commitment to political change. Interpersonal relationships, therefore, are created between people who are committed to the same idea. The idea stands as a “middle term” between them. It unites them through mutual appreciation, but equally separates them individually as the idea remains the central subject of their passion. It acts as a mediator such that individuals relate to one another only indirectly. As such, each individual finds their passion fulfilled in the idea and not in each other.
However, the quality of the idea will affect its ability to induce passion, and to preserve this dialectic. In addition to his description of community, therefore, Kierkegaard adds the stern warning that there is always a danger that a relational dialectical will lose its resilience and so simply morph into the crowd.1190 If one considers revolutionary movements, for instance, they may start with each person committed to the specific cause for which they are fighting, and so bound together only through this middle term. But when the great victory is not readily apparent, or circumstances change, the movement may simply morph into the relationally abusive regime they sought to overthrow in the first place.
However, when the idea is God, passion and inwardness reach their highest potential as there can be no greater pathos for the individual than the eternal, and its identity and our relation to it never changes. Although Kierkegaard believes that other ideas can have varying degrees of resilience, it is clear that when the idea is God, there is a qualitative difference. As Kierkegaard comments at the turn of 1847, “The truth can neither be communicated or received without the help of God, without God as accomplice, the middle term, since he is the truth. Therefore it can be communicated and received only by “the single individual.””1191 But why is this so? Why is the individual required as the means of God’s communication? To understand this statement, a further dynamic of the life-view needs elaboration.
If we turn again to the esteemed writer in A Literary Review, Kierkegaard argues that when someone, through inwardness, writes as an individual out of an authentic life-view, they themselves fall into the background. What is left with the reader is the communication, not the communicator. When considering an address, Kierkegaard writes,
If you have listened properly to a sermon brim-full of inwardness, even if your gaze has been fixed on the pastor, you will find it impossible to describe the pastor’s appearance. . . . Outwardness, on the other hand, forces itself upon one, making it impossible to forget because there is nothing to remember.1192
As Kierkegaard elaborates, “Where essential passion is present in inwardness, the surroundings are forgotten.”1193 In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard uses the image of the theatre where the prompter whispers to the actor to aid their performance before the audience. In the same way, the voice of the individual other is but a whisper to focus the individual on their self-conscious performance before God.1194 Only individuals can communicate God as only individuals will point away from themselves to bring the other into relationship with themselves before God.
In the crowd, the individual is undermined as each person is bound to protect the status quo and so be focused on the crowd itself. In a genuine community, the individual is created as not only is there a resilient and sustainable idea to which each individual is related as a middle term, but each individual is constantly pointing the other back to that idea. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard continues his discussion in relation to such earthly responsibilities as marriage, parenthood, and profession and argues that the point is not for the individual to withdraw from these offices,1195 but to understand that when they are conducted rightly the individual is aware that “in this relation you are relating yourself to yourself as a single individual with eternal responsibility.”1196 Kierkegaard’s point is that such responsibilities can be the means through which we lose ourselves, so when done authentically they become the means through which we come to know and express ourselves as individuals. Kierkegaard’s question to each individual is, therefore, whether such relationships are “in conformity with your responsibility as a single individual.”1197 Quite apart from separating oneself off from life’s responsibilities, such an awareness is intended to “penetrate” life’s responsibilities such that it will “support and transfigure and illuminate your conduct in the relationships of life.”1198
It should be noticed that the contribution genuine community makes to the individual is not the imparting of knowledge per se. Such relationships do not provide the content of truth or act as a surrogate for a relationship with God. Rather, the community primarily affects the individual’s disposition before and to God. If we recall the impact of a mature writer, their work excites, persuades, and evangelizes the reader in the development of their own life-view, not by teaching them something factually new. These ideas are clarified in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions where Kierkegaard comments,
But one human being cannot teach another true wonder and true fear. Only when they compress and expand your soul—yours, yes yours, yours alone in the whole world, because you have become alone with the Omnipresent One—only then are they in truth for you.1199
A knowledge of God can only be received through direct relationship with God. However, the imagery of compressing and expanding is clear in describing how, in a form of spiritual resuscitation, the genuine human relationship helps the individual in breathing God in—as described above, a re-spiratio. Through this relationship the individual is therefore brought before God. This is what it means to be in true relationship, when the other is “in truth for you.”
Community as Human Necessity?
What is striking about Kierkegaard’s vision of community is that it affirms the importance of the differences between individuals for their development. This has already been emphasized by the uniqueness of each person’s life-view, and the individual road each person walks to the same truth. For when “truth is subjectivity,” it is precisely this subjective element that draws individuals out into new ways of seeing and understanding. In a journal article from 1849 Kierkegaard dismisses the traditional understanding of human community as defined by man and woman and states:
What is the idea “community”? It is not the association of several people of the same age; it is rather a unity which shows various ages in the most intimate interrelation. Thus: the grandparents, man and wife, children of various ages—this is really community. This is “community” and a beautiful unity, too. Each age has its own eccentric possibility—therefore the different ages provide a corrective for each other. For example, how beneficial the child-adult corrective is, restraining a person from becoming pure spirit or from becoming too serious etc.1200
This “beautiful unity” is again, we may argue, established in how each member draws the other into their relationship before God through what they effect in that individual. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard argues for the primacy of neighbor love over and against erotic love. And this is somewhat confirmed in The Point of View where Kierkegaard argues that Christianity creates equality by drawing everyone into relationship as neighbors. However, far from the designation “neighbor” destroying all particularity, what the above discussion reveals is that the neighbor must include the particularity of each individual and, therefore, the uniqueness of their relationship to the individual. Our relationships as children, parents, and lovers are not leveled by neighbor love, but are rather transfigured through the mediation of God, and their particularity allowed to develop the individual uniquely. Community is, therefore, important for their spiritual development.
Something of the necessary element of community has already been suggested in that it is only the single individual that may communicate God. However, Kierkegaard offers a further justification a year later. When discussing the extremity of the relationship of the individual before God, Kierkegaard argues,
Right at this point the real meaning of religious sociality is to be found—that is, when the ideality of the God-relationship has become too strong for an individual . . . he must now have another person to discuss it with. From this we see that sociality is not the highest but is really a concession to human weakness. Here, also, is the significance of the idea that God relates himself to the whole race. The idea of the race, of sociality, is then a middle term between God and the single individual. . . . There is alleviation . . . in making use of sociality. It is not good for man to be alone, it is said, and therefore woman was given to him for community. But it is true that being alone, literally alone with God, is almost unendurable for a man, is too frightfully strenuous—therefore man needs community. God and man are separated by an infinite qualitative difference; when the relationship becomes too strenuous, the category of community must come between as a middle term.1201
This entry offers us an illuminating window into Kierkegaard’s perception of community. To refer to it as a “concession to human weakness” brings to mind Moses’ allowance for divorce in the Old Testament, or rather unfortunate interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 and Paul’s supposed admittance of sex to curb lusts.1202 And yet, despite the use of this begrudging phrase, Kierkegaard still recognizes that it is a requirement of human nature and not something that can be easily cast aside.
One should perhaps here reflect upon Kierkegaard’s personal experience. Although his demand for the single individual remains clear and forthright throughout his authorship, it is a concept that stands outside his own experience as he considered that he was not a single individual, and that he had perhaps never met one. However, human relationships were something he considered he knew a lot about. And they were rarely a positive experience, and certainly far from simple. Where Kierkegaard’s description of the individual remained static as a somewhat ideal concept, therefore, his description of human relationships remains far less stable and is colored by his own experiences from moment to moment.
Attempting to understand whether Kierkegaard believed that authentic community may be theoretically true, requires seeing through statements that may doubt whether it may be practically possible. When considering human relationships, Kierkegaard was concerned with the resilience of the dialectical relationships described above that separate individuals ideally, and whether they would simply collapse back into the crowd.1203 It may be suggested that sometimes he believed the dialectic could be maintained, and sometimes it could not. In Practice in Christianity, for instance, he speaks of it as merely an eschatological possibility.1204 And even in 1846 Kierkegaard had declared that it would be best if the individual spoke exclusively to themselves and to God.1205 The above journal entry is therefore illuminating in describing something of this internal tension. Kierkegaard reflects a frustration that human beings cannot ultimately escape each other and live in pure, unadulterated relationship with God. And yet, even in the heart of this frustration, he still recognizes that genuine human community is not just important, but also necessary.
Some Concluding Remarks
Kierkegaard cannot be considered a communitarian thinker per se, and the vision we have described was clearly not at the forefront of Kierkegaard’s mind and has had to be teased out somewhat. Drawing the individual out of the crowd was Kierkegaard’s task and perhaps, should he have encountered a genuine individual, he might then have had to present something more systematically on this second move into community. And yet, as this essay has shown, the second movement is still present in his work as both important and potentially necessary. Kierkegaard understands that single individuals are those who reject sagacity and speculation for knowledge re-spiratio, and who allow an authentic life-view to develop within them. It is from this life-view that they are able to communicate God to others, not specifically through preaching and direct communication, but through the simple expression of their life-view that is revealed throughout their writing, speaking, and form of life. And it is precisely the unique subjectivity of this life-view that proves so evocative and persuasive, and which they find so fruitful in receiving from others. These reciprocal engagements are both important and necessary as each individual becomes bound to each other through the content of their life-views, God as the middle term. Thus far we have therefore answered the first of our questions: what is the nature of the community for Kierkegaard? But what about our second: Does it fall within the religious or political sphere?
The community is clearly different from the crowd, and cannot be considered simply a political entity, according to Kierkegaard’s definition at the start. While it may have concern for the earth in terms of the individual’s concrete existence, it does not seek to maintain the individual’s focus on the earth. It rather develops the individual toward eternity.
However, is it a religious entity? If we understand the religious as defined by God’s relationship to something, then we have to answer “No.” Although God clearly uses individuals to communicate himself to others, he does not appear to relate to the community qua community. In this respect, we have done nothing to undermine Kierkegaard’s statement that “from a religious point of view, there is only the single individual.”1206 And yet neither of these above two points does justice to what we have described. More needs to be said.
The point for Kierkegaard is that the community has a kenotic quality to it. Authentic community creates, develops, and sustains the individual by always maintaining the relational dialectic that points away from itself to the middle term, God. Consequently, community never stands in the way of the individual’s relationship with God, but evaporates in its communication of God. In some sense, therefore, the community is like the crowd in its identity as a phantom. However, where the crowd disappears as a form of evasion of responsibility, the community disappears as its responsibility. The community must, therefore, have some relationship to the religious. However, it is also clear that the community has political relevance in terms of meeting the individual’s temporal needs. Even if it is by way of grudging acceptance, Kierkegaard understands that human beings are made for each other and cannot simply exist in exclusive relationship to God. So there is a sense in which, alongside this kenotic ability, the community never ultimately disappears and the individual is to recognize the human others and to be in relationship to them.
Considered in this way, the opposition between the religious and political is redefined and recontextualized. In Fear and Trembling Johannes presents us with the evocative image of the Knight of Faith receiving the temporal back again through the eternal. Here we might say that the political is suspended in the religious. However, this does not do justice to the dynamic we have elaborated here. For it is equally the eternal that comes through the temporal, the religious through the political. The difficulty in speaking of this dynamic, we may argue, is due to the context of a sinful world. Eschatologically speaking, the religious and the political may be mutually enforcing, sharing perhaps in the same kenotic qualities that permanently, instantaneously drive individuals from one to the other—our human relationships always evaporating to drive us to God, only for God to drive us back again. To use terminology discussed above, it is to suggest that the religious and political not only “penetrate” each other, but “support and transfigure and illuminate” each other.1207 Indeed, this perhaps draws us closer to Anti-Climacus’s definition in The Sickness Unto Death, of humankind as spirit as a relation which relates to itself between our polarity as eternal and temporal. And yet, in our sinful state, what is in doubt for Kierkegaard is whether such a redeemed political reality may exist—whether our human relationships can ever drive us kenotically back to God. If it doesn’t, then the individual must exist purely in the eternal, which never changes. However, without the mediation of human relationships, the individual comes face to face with the terror of that direct relationship with God that Kierkegaard experienced himself so acutely.
It may be said, therefore, that Kierkegaard does have an understanding of authentic community, at least in principle. However, he leaves us with a question as to its practice. Do such relationships actually exist, or are they now simply an eschatological possibility? Kierkegaard may have given a different answer at different times.1208 If our answer is no, then so be it. We may follow Kierkegaard in his “lonely labyrinth,” to use Josiah Thompson’s provocative phrase.1209 But if our answer is yes, Kierkegaard provides an extraordinary, subversive, demanding corrective of how our political lives here in temporality must kenotically drive us toward the eternal. And if they don’t and the relational dialectic collapses, he offers us his most damning critique.
For some, of course, this concept of community does not do enough, and we are far from a Hauerwasian sect or Bonhoefferian ecclesiology. However, the aim of this essay has been more modest. It has sought to show that Kierkegaard does have an understanding of community that is not simply important for the individual but necessary, and one in which the human other is required in all their reality, particularity, and reciprocity.1210 This does not perhaps rescue Kierkegaard from having failed to grant the community a more ontological existence as opposed to function, but it does go far enough to question such accusations as individualism, acosmism, and moral nihilism that are never far from his door.
Bibliography
Clark, Adam C., and Michael Mawson, eds. Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013.
Connell, George B, and C. Stephen Evans, eds. Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community. New Jersey: Humanities, 1992.
Cutting, Patricia. “The Levels of Interpersonal Relationships in Kierkegaard’s Two Ages.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 73–87. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984.
Elrod, John. Kierkegaard and Christendom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Houe, Paul, et al., eds. Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Søren Kierkegaard. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
Johnson, Howard A., and Niels Thulstrup. “Kierkegaard and Politics.” In A Kierkegaard Critique, edited by Howard A. Johnson et al., 74–84. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962.
———, eds. A Kierkegaard Critique. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Early Polemical Writings. Translated by Julia Watkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
———. Edifying Discourses: A Selection. Translated by David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.
———. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
———. Journals and Papers. 7 vols. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967–1978.
———. A Literary Review. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin, 2001.
———. The Point of View. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
———. Practice in Christianity. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. The Sickness Unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
———. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
———. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
———. Without Authority. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Kirkpatrick, Matthew D. Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of Religionless Christianity. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011.
———. “Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical: The Beginning or End of Ethics?” In Ontology and Ethics: Bonhoeffer and Contemporary Scholarship, edited by Adam C. Clark et al., 86–101. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013.
Kylliäinan, Janne. “Envy.” In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Envy to Incognito, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel et al., 1–8. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
Mackey, Louis. “The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard’s Ethics.” In Review of Metaphysics 15 (1962) 602–20.
Perkins, Robert L. “Envy as Personal Phenomenon and as Politics.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary, 107–32.
———, ed. International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984.
Plekon, Michael. “Kierkegaard the Theologian: The Roots of His Theology in Works of Love.” In Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, edited by George B. Connell et al., 2–17. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1992.
Rocca, Ettore. “Søren Kierkegaard and Silence.” In Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Søren Kierkegaard, edited by Paul Houe et al., 77–83. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
Strawser, Michael. “Gifts of Silence from Kierkegaard and Derrida.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 89 (2006) 55–72.
Thompson, Josiah. The Lonely Labyrinth: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.
Tilley, J. Michael. “Interpersonal Relationships and Community in Kierkegaard’s Thought.” PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2008.
———. “The Role of Others in ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’: From A Literary Review to Works of Love.” In Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2007, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., 160–76. New York: de Gruyter, 2007.
Westphal, Merold. “Kierkegaard’s Sociology.” In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 133–54. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984.
1138. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 104.
1139. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2049 (XI1 A 60 n.d., 1854); 2081 (X12 A 135 n.d., 1854); 2570 (X12 A 54 n.d., 1854).
1140. Ibid., 2571 (X12 A 55 n.d., 1854).
1141. Ibid., 1067 (X12 A 63 n.d., 1854).
1142. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 103.
1143. As indicative of the situation this essay is addressing, in Merold Westphal’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s sociology the only Kierkegaardian categories discussed are purely negative subsets of “the crowd,” and no consideration is given to the possibility of any positive sociological categorization by Kierkegaard (Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology”).
1144. For more on the impact of 1848 and the movement of Kierkegaard’s authorship, see Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom, 23–47; Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom, 3–46; Tilley, “Interpersonal Relationships.”
1145. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 309.
1146. For more on the complexity of silence in Kierkegaard’s work see Rocca, “Søren Kierkegaard and Silence,” and Strawser, “Gifts of Silence.”
1147. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 22.
1148. Prov 9:10.
1149. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 309.
1150. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses, 10.
1151. Ibid., 18.
1152. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 303.
1153. Ibid., 325.
1154. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 122.
1155. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses, 40.
1156. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 106, 108. In his journals, Kierkegaard originally designated the crowd “evil” (JP, 2932 [VIII1 A 656 n.d., 1847–48]).
1157. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 118; JP, 2004 (VIII1 A 482 n.d., 1847).
1158. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2154 (IX A 282 n.d., 1848).
1159. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 33–34.
1160. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 107; JP, 2955 (X3 A 105 n.d., 1851).
1161. Howard Johnson comments that in such a period, “statistics will replace ethics.” Cf. Johnson, “Kierkegaard and Politics,” 76.
1162. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 106–7.
1163. Kierkegaard, Without Authority, 76.
1164. Cutting, “Levels,” 78.
1165. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 81–82.
1166. A central element of the fear of self and crowd is envy—a topic that is important but cannot be elaborated on here. For more on envy, see Perkins, “Envy”; Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom, 108–14; Kylliäinan, “Envy.”
1167. Space does not allow a full engagement with the nuances of the crowd described in LR. For a more comprehensive presentation, see Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology.”
1168. Unlike the revolutionary age, the present age is “sensible, reflective, dispassionate, eruptive in its fleeting enthusiasms and prudently indolent in its relaxation” (Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 60). It is an age defined not by passionate engagement, but by “eruptive enthusiasm” and “apathetic indolence” (ibid., 65)—what Kierkegaard had previously referred to in 1835 as a “bustling busyness,” “a fitful fumbling,” and a “restless rambling” (Kierkegaard, Early Polemical Writings, 48).
1169. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 72; Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2986 (XI2 A 88 n.d., 1854).
1170. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 35.
1171. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 107.
1172. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2986 (XI2 A 88 n.d., 1854).
1173. Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology,” 134.
1174. This essay agrees with Michael Plekon’s summary that “[Kierkegaard’s] affirmative theology was restrained, even submerged, in both published writings and unpublished journals. Yet it was never repudiated, nor was it ever completely concealed. Kierkegaard’s strategy of understatement may have worked too well. We have heard only the side he put first and very strongly” (Plekon, “Kierkegaard the Theologian,” 12–13).
1175. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 595 (X5 B 245 n.d., 1849–50).
1176. It is noticeable that in some defenses of a Kierkegaardian community, the aim is indeed to find “genuine interpersonal relationships,” yet a precise definition of what this must necessarily entail is ignored (cf. Cutting, “Levels”; Tilley, “Role of Others”). When seeking an authentic understanding of community, it is important that it is not simply assumed to exist through the giving actions of the individual, but rather only through a form of reciprocity.
1177. Kierkegaard, Early Polemical Writings, 77.
1178. Ibid., 78.
1179. Ibid., 77.
1180. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2258 (Pap. II A 302; JP, 2267 / Pap, II A 524).
1181. Ibid., 2274 (Pap., III A 5).
1182. Kierkegaard, Early Polemical Writings, 66.
1183. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 13.
1184. Ibid., 16.
1185. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses, 38.
1186. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 18.
1187. Kierkegaard, Edifying Discourses, 170; Kierkegaard, Three Discourses, 18–19.
1188. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 55.
1189. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2952 (X2 A 390 n.d., 1850).
1190. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 69.
1191. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2932 (VIII1 A 656 n.d., 1847–48).
1192. Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 30.
1193. Ibid., 33.
1194. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 124–25.
1195. As Kierkegaard comments in 1846, “As in the highest form of religion, the individual is primarily related to God and then to the community, but this primary relation is the highest, yet he does not neglect the second” (Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 4110 [VII1 A 20 n.d., 1846]).
1196. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 131, cf. 129.
1197. Ibid., 130.
1198. Ibid., 137.
1199. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses, 25.
1200. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 4161 (X1 A 369 n.d., 1849).
1201. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1377 (IX A 315 n.d., 1848). Space does not permit this passage to be fully unpacked. Further questions are raised here about what Kierkegaard considered humankind’s natural state to be, and whether this “human weakness” was from the beginning. Is, for instance, the creation of Eve a matter of perfection or weakness in Adam for Kierkegaard?
1202. Matt 19:8 and 1 Cor 7:2.
1203. Even where the middle term is God, it is very clear from Kierkegaard’s attacks on Christendom that even the divine can be easily converted into an idea that actively collapses the dialectical tension rather than sustains it. It is in this light that Christ as the paradox maintains its profound importance in undermining our human propensity for this kind of theological sagacity.
1204. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 223.
1205. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 106.
1206. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 595 (X5 B 245).
1207. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 137.
1208. One is reminded here of Kierkegaard’s own admissions in 1843 that “if I had had faith I would have stayed with Regine,” which may suggest a fluctuation as to whether authentic human relationships may exist in service to the eternal. Cf. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 5664 (IV B 142 n.d., 1843).
1209. Thompson, Lonely Labyrinth.
1210. The human other is not simply an opportunity for internal reflection or the expression of individuality (cf. Mackey, “Loss of the World,” 609–11) but must be a concrete, particular other to which we are submitted.