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.
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…
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