Søren Kierkegaard · Philosophy
Kierkegaard’s practical mission: to recover the single individual - ‘that individual’ - from the anonymous crowd, and to expose the comfortable ‘Christendom’ that had turned the infinite demand of faith into respectable social conformity. His furious final campaign insisted that becoming a Christian is the hardest task there is.
If there is a single word for Kierkegaard’s whole mission, it is the Danish hin Enkelte - ‘that individual’, or ‘the single one’. He regarded this as his decisive category, the heart of his entire authorship, and even wished it inscribed as his epitaph. Everything we have studied - truth as subjectivity, the stages, anxiety and despair, the knight of faith - converges on this one point: the recovery of the single, concrete, existing individual from everything that would dissolve them into an anonymous mass. To become ‘that individual’ is to step out of the crowd, the public, the herd, the abstraction of ‘humanity’ or ‘the age’, and to stand as the one you are - accountable, irreplaceable, alone before God and conscience. Kierkegaard addressed his works not to ‘the public’ or ‘the reader’ in general but to ‘that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader’ - to you, the one actually reading, not as a member of any group but as the unrepeatable person you are.
This is not a recommendation of selfishness or isolation; it is the opposite of the crowd’s comfortable irresponsibility. The point of becoming an individual is to take up the full weight of being a self - to refuse to hide one’s conscience, one’s choices, one’s relation to the eternal, in the anonymity of the collective. In the crowd, Kierkegaard observes, the individual is relieved of responsibility: no one is accountable, because ‘everyone’ and therefore no one decided, did, or believed; the crowd offers the warm comfort of never having to stand alone. To become ‘that individual’ is to renounce this comfort and to accept the solitary dignity and burden of being a self who must answer, finally, not to the opinion of the many but to God and to one’s own conscience. It is the practical upshot of his entire philosophy: the truths of existence can only be lived by an individual, the leaps can only be made by an individual, faith can only be ventured by an individual - and the first and last task is therefore to become one.
Kierkegaard’s critique of the crowd reaches its most explosive application in his attack on what he called Christendom - the comfortable, established, official Christianity of nineteenth-century Denmark, where everyone was a Christian by virtue of being born, baptised, and respectable, where the State Church was a cosy institution woven into the social order, and where being a Christian cost nothing and demanded nothing. This, Kierkegaard came to insist with mounting fury, was a colossal illusion and a betrayal - for ‘Christendom’ was precisely not Christianity. Genuine Christianity, as he had analysed it throughout his work, is the most demanding thing imaginable: the infinite, terrifying task of becoming a single individual in absolute relation to God, of dying away from the world, of faith ‘by virtue of the absurd’, of imitating a crucified Lord. Christendom had taken this scandalous, strenuous, world-defying faith and turned it into its comfortable opposite: a respectable social identity that everyone possessed automatically, that fit seamlessly into bourgeois life, and that demanded nothing more than showing up at church and being a decent citizen.
The sleight of hand, Kierkegaard charged, was monstrous. By making everyone a Christian, Christendom had made no one a Christian, because it had abolished the very thing that makes one a Christian: the individual’s passionate, costly, inward appropriation of an infinite demand. When ‘Christian’ means simply ‘Danish citizen’, the word has been emptied of all content; the crowd has swallowed Christianity as it swallows everything, dissolving the single individual’s relation to God into a comfortable collective identity that requires no decision, no risk, no transformation. The clergy, drawing comfortable salaries to assure everyone that they were already Christians, were - Kierkegaard came to say with savage directness - betraying Christianity precisely by making it easy. The New Testament’s Christianity was a stumbling-block, a scandal, a fire; Christendom had turned it into a pleasant Sunday habit and a guarantee of social respectability. This was the supreme example of ‘the crowd is untruth’: the most demanding individual relation conceivable, dissolved into the most comfortable mass conformity.
Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom is the practical culmination of his entire philosophy, and it reveals what was at stake in all the abstract-seeming doctrines we have studied. ‘Truth is subjectivity’, the stages, the leap, anxiety and despair, the knight of faith, the single individual: all of it was aimed, finally, at a single target - the recovery of genuine, costly, individual existence (and supremely, genuine Christian faith) from the comfortable illusions by which we evade it. The deepest of those illusions, for Kierkegaard, was Christendom: the belief that one already has faith, already is a Christian, simply by being a respectable member of a Christian society - that the infinite demand has been met, the hardest task accomplished, the leap already taken, when in fact nothing has been ventured at all. This is the most dangerous despair of all, because it does not know itself as despair; the comfortable Christian of Christendom is, on Kierkegaard’s analysis, further from faith than the open unbeliever, precisely because they imagine they already possess what they have never even begun to seek.
The enduring force of this critique extends far beyond the specific quarrel with the Danish Church. Kierkegaard exposed a permanent human temptation: to take the most demanding things - faith, love, integrity, selfhood - and reduce them to comfortable, automatic, socially-sanctioned possessions that cost nothing and transform nothing. Every institution that turns an infinite demand into a respectable routine, every culture that lets us believe we are good, faithful, or authentic simply by conforming to what ‘everyone’ does, falls under his indictment. His insistence that becoming a Christian is the hardest, not the easiest, thing - a lifelong task, not a birthright - is a standing rebuke to all cheap grace and all comfortable religion. And his more general claim - that the most important things in existence can only be won by the individual, at cost, through passion and decision, and are always being cheapened by the crowd into something easy and automatic - applies to far more than religion. It is the final, fierce expression of the conviction that animated his whole life: that you cannot be saved, or be good, or be yourself, in the crowd; that the truth must be lived by a single individual; and that the comfortable assurance that one has already arrived is the surest sign that one has never set out. He died to make that one point: that it is hard to become what we so easily assume we already are.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Kierkegaard’s practical aim was to make people into single individuals (‘that individual’) rather than units of the crowd (‘the crowd is untruth’), and that his final campaign attacked ‘Christendom’ for cheapening faith into respectable conformity. Explain ‘that individual’ and the attack on Christend…
Leads to Friedrich Nietzsche.
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