Søren Kierkegaard
Christian existentialism · Denmark, 1813–1855
The lens
The Kierkegaardian lens reads an event by asking what it demands of the single individual, cutting past the anonymous public to the person who must choose and cannot delegate the choice. Its vocabulary is subjectivity as the site of truth, the crowd as untruth, the stages of existence—aesthetic, ethical, religious—and despair understood in The Sickness Unto Death as a misrelation of the self to itself. This lens asks, with The Present Age, whether a controversy is real passion or mere reflection and chatter, a leveling process in which everyone has an opinion and no one is committed, since the public is a phantom that dissolves when a name is asked of it. From Fear and Trembling it distinguishes genuine faith and decision from the ethical generality that hides behind consensus. It treats endless commentary as evasion of the moment of choice that constitutes a self. Where other lenses analyze structures and aggregates, the Kierkegaardian lens returns the event to the existing individual answerable for a response. It notices the anesthetic comfort of the crowd, the substitution of talk for action, and the anxiety that both freedom and its avoidance provoke.
Takes
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