the irony of it all - darren zook

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ARTICLE

THE IRONY OF IT ALL: SREN KIERKEGAARDAND THEANXIOUS PLEASURES OFCIVIL SOCIETY

Darren C. Zook

With Kierkegaard, everything is different.1 To read the works of

Kierkegaard, to delve into their linguistic games and lexical mazes, is to

set out on a journey of what might be called enlightened exasperation. Inone moment Kierkegaard tells us we should strive ethically for truthfulness;

in another, Kierkegaard reveals that sometimes truthfulness is best achieved

through deceit. Much of Kierkegaards philosophical archive is written

under various pseudonyms, each with a different world-view and motive;

quite often, that motive is to critique or undermine what the other

pseudonymous authors have written.2 Many a scholar has mined the works

of Kierkegaard to understand the impressive and prescient contributions

Kierkegaard has made to fields ranging from existentialist philosophy,

linguistics, psychology, religious studies, and even literary criticism. ButKierkegaards specific contributions to the history of political philosophy,

and more specifically to the idea of civil society, while perhaps not

1All citations in the text refer to both Danish and English editions of Sren Kierkegaards

writings. For the Danish versions, the abbreviated references are as follows: SV3, followed by

volume and page number, refers to the third edition of the Samlede Vrker (1962); SKS,

followed by volume and page number, refers to the critical Danish edition Sren Kierkegaards

Skrifter(1994);Pap.followed by entry number refers to Sren Kierkegaards Papirer(190948;

196970). As is customary, English versions are taken from the standard edition Kierkegaards

Writings (KW), edited by Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong et al. (1978). Individual worksfrom the English edition will be abbreviated in this paper as follows: The Sickness Unto Death

(KW XIX)SUD; Either/Or (KW III and IV) EO I and EO II; Prefaces (KW IX)P;

Concluding Unscientific Postscript (KW XII.1 and XII.2)CUP; Works of Love (KW

XVI)WL; Stages on Lifes Way (KW XI)SLW; Judge for Yourself (KW XXI) JFY;

For Self-Examination (KW XXI)FSE; The Point of View for my Work as an Author (KW

XXII) POV; The Concept of Irony (KW II) CI; and The Concept of Anxiety (KW

VIII)CA. There are two exceptions to this: P/JAlastair Hannays edition ofKierkegaards

Papers and Journals: A Selection (Harmondsworth, 1996); LRHannays translation of A

Literary Review (Harmondsworth, 2001).2In this paper I have tried to simplify things hopefully without distorting them by referring

simply to Kierkegaard except where it is strictly necessary to point out which pseudonymousauthor is speaking. On the issue of Kierkegaards pseudonymous authors, see generally,

Kierkegaard: pseudonymitet edited by Birgit Bertung Paul Muller and Fritz Norlan

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(2) 2008: 393 419


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completely ignored, have certainly been undervalued.3 In recent years, a

growing number of scholars have tried to remedy this unfortunate neglect

and to defend Kierkegaard against the charge that his political ideas were

hopelessly complex or impractical to the point of futility. Scholars such as

Mark Dooley, Merold Westphal, Bruce Kirmmse, George Pattison and

Martin Matustik, to name a few, have already contributed in creative and

productive ways to the project of rehabilitating Kierkegaard in the realm

of political philosophy and practice. Here I hope to add to this larger and

ongoing project by focusing specifically on Kierkegaards philosophy as it

relates to the idea of civil society.

One of the goals of this paper is therefore to re-examine Kierkegaards

place in the history of civil society as a philosophical concept and

additionally to explain why Kierkegaards lesser-known version of civil

society took the form that it did. In more specific terms, I argue first, that

Kierkegaards political musings offer a substantial and productive additionto the evolutionary archive of philosophical conceptions of civil society; and

second, that these musings were meant to provide a complex and radically

innovative blueprint for the reconciliation of inner-directed subjectivity and

outer-directed sociality that responds to the contradictions and lacunae

Kierkegaard perceived in the works of his predecessors and contemporaries.

By starting with Kierkegaards conception of self and focusing on its

intricate formulations, and then moving to Kierkegaards vision of the self

as it moves through (and sometimes against) society, I will suggest that

Kierkegaard can be read as a pragmatic and elaborate response to other,more abstract theories of political evolution and social complexity in

circulation at the time. The apparent radicalness of Kierkegaards vision of

civil society a radicalness that is generated by a relentless disavowal of the

temptations offered by more settled and standardized frameworks of

political vision stems from his own perception that he was living in a time

of unsettling turmoil and transition, and that the decay and decline

generated by the historical age could only be overcome through

extraordinary and profound measures.

SITUATING KIERKEGAARD: THE CIVIL SOCIETY DEBATE

Like so many other philosophers of his time, Kierkegaard was writing in a

moment that seemed saturated by a sense of grave crisis.4 This sense of crisis

3The exceptions to this are discussed in the text below. Here I will only note that, for instance,

two central overviews of the history of civil society, Adam B. Seligmans The Idea of Civil

Society(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and John Ehrenbergs Civil Society: The

Critical History of an Idea(New York: New York University Press, 1999), do not contain even asingle reference to Kierkegaard.4To understand Kierkegaard in context the most useful texts would be Joakim Garff SAK:

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originated in what appeared to be a hopelessly irreparable misalignment of

the connective forces of society, composed as they were of a conceptual

matrix of elements such as interpersonal ethics, religious tenets, political

values, social norms, and civic virtues. For Kierkegaard, much of the crisis

could be traced to an obsession with living only in-the-present-moment

(nutiden), an affliction that was seen as peculiar to modernity, and an afflic-

tion whose affective correlate, as George Pattison points out, often takes

the form of melancholy, a sense of loss, emptiness or absence[.]5 Kierkegaard

himself found evidence of this general sense of non-reflective, in-the-moment

living nearly everywhere he looked, particularly around the supposedly

cosmopolitan city of Copenhagen. The forces of the reading public are

concentrated in Copenhagen, he noted, and yet this concentration has

nothing to do with strength but only with uproar and noise and racket and

officious busyness in all external endeavors (SV3 5, 209; P 15). Why the

citizens of Copenhagen seem to be permanently distracted by externalendeavors, and why they seem unaware of the latent, potential power in their

midst, are generative questions that would become for Kierkegaard the

entry-points first to a general critique of the crises wrought by a nascent

modernity and then to an exploration of the slumbering potential embedded

in civil society to serve as a corrective antidote to those crises.

Kierkegaard was not, of course, the first philosopher of his age to grapple

with the practical or conceptual complexities of civil society. Then, as now,

the idea of civil society had different meanings to different interpreters. In

the first half of the nineteenth century, several formulations of the idea ofcivil society were competing in an intellectual debate about the proper

relationship between the formal politics of the state and the normative

(civic) bonds of public society. One of these formulations of civil society

could be traced back to Locke, for whom the term referred to the collection

of individuals outside the state who, through the establishment of bonds of

interpersonal trust, had managed to provide a voluntary source of

legitimacy for the state and to create an autonomous space to pursue a

proper Christian life.6 Another formulation one associated with several

translation by Bruce H. Kirmmse as Sren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2005); and Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001). Other useful works are Harald van Mendelssohn, Sren

Kierkegaard: Ein Genie in einer Kleinstadt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995); and Maria Veltman,

Sren Kierkegaard: Een biografische schets aan de hand van zijn geschreven nalatenschap (Assen/

Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1987). For an interesting and remarkably intimate portrait of

Kierkegaards familial context and the strained and often vituperative relationship with his

brother, see Flemming Chr. Nielsen, Ind i Verdens Vrimmel: Sren Kierkegaards ukendte bror

(Viborg: Holkenfeldt, 1998).5George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 20.6John Dunn, The contemporary political significance of John Lockes conception of civil

society in Civil Society: History and Possibilities edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani

THE IRONY OF IT ALL 395


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luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment and one that brings us closer to the

contributions of Kierkegaard could be traced to the moral philosophy

associated with the rise of the market and commercial relations, which

supposedly offered opportunities for the secularization of interpersonal

relations and the liberation of those relations from particularistic and kin-

based networks, thereby creating a genuinely autonomous public.7 It was

Hegel, however, who created the most ambitiously systematic rendering of

the idea of civil society, a rendering against which Kierkegaard would

construct much of his own contrary version.

The general concept of civil society in Hegels philosophy has been

extensively covered elsewhere in the voluminous secondary literature and

need not be summarized here.8 Here I would like to emphasize only those

aspects of Hegels writings on civil society that prompted Kierkegaards

response and inspired his own vision of civil society. To do that, however, it

is necessary first to situate and explain Hegels particular vision as a partialand perhaps indirect response to the writings of Adam Ferguson, in

particular his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).9 One of the

generative elements of Fergusons Essay is the idea of recapturing and

restoring the virile competitiveness of political life and the cultivation of

what he calls the arduous virtues.10 Through a form of non-violent but

aggressively spirited and competitive interaction, citizens cultivate both

normative bonds and civic virtues; together these bonds and virtues give the

citizens a source of oppositional power against the state to prevent the latter

from accruing to itself or appropriating from the citizens the preponderanceof political power. Civil society, in other words, cannot be understood

without the concomitant presence of the state and formal politics.

Kierkegaard, as we shall see, saw this tendency to understand civil society

only as it relates to the state as a violation of the autonomy of civil society

and as a debilitating element of dependency which would ultimately

undermine the bondedness of civil society.

As is well known, Hegel borrowed from Fergusons work, at times

heavily, although significantly, and crucially for understanding the

Kierkegaardian response, Hegel translated, or perhaps mistranslated,

7John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition, in Istvan

Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of the Political Economy in the

Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Richard Boyd,

Reappraising the Scottish Moralists and Civil Society, Polity 33 (Fall 2000) No. 1: 10125.8For a general introduction, see, for instance, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, U ber die Rolle der

bu rgerlichen Gesellschaft in Hegels politischer Philosophie, in Materialen zu Hegels

Rechtsphilosophie, edited by Manfred Riedel (Frankfurt, 1974) vol. 2, pp. 276311.9On understanding Ferguson in context, see Jose Harris, From Richard Hooker to Harold

Laski: Changing Perceptions of Civil Society in British Thought, Late Sixteenth to Early

Twentieth Centuries, in Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, edited byJose Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 1337 (see esp. 246).10Adam Ferguson An Essay on the History of Civil Society edited by Fania Oz Salzberger

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Fergusons idea of civil society in such a way as to distort the general

emphasis on citizens in Fergusons vision into one that focused almost

exclusively on merchants (or more generally, the bourgeoisie).11 Indeed,

Hegel himself specifies his own conflation of citizen to mean bourgeois in

his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: In right the object is theperson,

in the moral viewpoint it is the subject, in the family it is thefamily-member,

and in civil society in general it is the citizen (as bourgeois).12 Aside from

thereby excluding non-bourgeois actors from the benefits of civil society,

Hegel also abstracts and, particularly insidious from Kierkegaards point of

view, institutionalizes the way in which these bourgeois citizens relate to the

formal politics of the state. First, such citizens are to form themselves into

groups or corporations that serve to educate their members into their civil

obligations and to provide recognition and verification of their status in

relation to their fellow citizens. In turn, these corporations also provide the

means by which civil society ultimately coalesces with the idea of the state,without which civil society, or any type of reasoned existence, cannot exist:

The state is in and of itself the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom,

and it is the absolute goal of reason that freedom should be actualized.13

For Hegel, institutions are necessary for the actualization of personal

freedom and are necessarily created by the state for the good of its citizens;

in return, citizens express their gratitude to the state for creating these

enabling institutions through the loyal sentiment of patriotism. This would

be a major point of departure for Kierkegaard: in opposition to Hegel,

Kierkegaard remained deeply mistrustful of the institutionalization of civiclife and the presumed reliance on the state for the exercise of personal

freedom. As we shall see, Kierkegaard responded by proposing his own

vision of civil society imbued with playful forms of everyday subversion to

resist and challenge the potential drift of civil society into moral ossification,

ethical passivity, and ultimately, institutional subservience to the totalitarian

state. Whereas for Hegel, civil society in essence needed the state to realize

its own identity and freedom, for Kierkegaard, only an inauthentic,

incomplete, or otherwise distorted civil society needed the state, at least in

the Hegelian sense. Patriotism was therefore not regarded as a civic virtue byKierkegaard, as it implied a form of narcissism expressed through loyalty to

what was in essence a closed, national community. Since the closure of

communities was a corollary to their institutionalization, an authentic

civil society would and must continuously render its boundaries open.

11On Hegels debt to Ferguson and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, see Norbert Waszek,

The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegels Account of Civil Society(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers, 1988). For the origins of and precursors to Hegels acts of interpretive translation,

see Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-

Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).12Hegel,Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, inWerke in zwanzig Banden, vol. 7 (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp 1970) x 190 (p 348) (hereafter cited as PR)



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Interestingly, this would transform Kierkegaard into an advocate of an

enhanced if not altogether revised version of Kantian cosmopolitanism.

Mark Dooley has used this quality of openness as a starting point to

reconstruct a politics of responsibility out of Kierkegaards philosophical

projects. According to Dooley, Kierkegaards writings seem to presage the

corpus of Derridas works devoted to the ethical obligations of establishing

empathetic bonds with outsiders and marginalized others by continually

reaching across boundaries that would otherwise occlude our moral vision.

What Kierkegaard and Derrida both oppose, in Dooleys view, is the

propensity of communities and political totalities to establish rigid borders

that maintain a culture of closure toward the other.14 I am certainly

sympathetic to the argument offered by Dooley, but I am less interested here

in understanding how Kierkegaard anticipates Derrida than in how

Kierkegaard crafted his responses in his own contemporaneous moment,

in particular as rejections of significant parts of the formulations of civilsociety offered by Hegel and by Ferguson.

From a different angle, the ethical incitement toward openness also invites

a review of Kierkegaards mischievous penchant for using a variety of

pseudonymous authors in parts of his literary corpus. How can we be

certain, one might ask, as to what Kierkegaard meant for civic actors to do

in public life, or how can we even be sure that Kierkegaard meant it? Roger

Poole has argued against the idea of understanding what Kierkegaard

meant in any definite way, whether about civil actions or about anything,

on the grounds that Kierkegaards complex matrix of real and pseudon-ymous authors intentionally precludes any definite reading. When read as a

literary endeavour, Poole suggests, Kierkegaards literary works remain

elusively mysterious: I shall suggest that the mystery is impenetrable to the

end, and that is because Kierkegaards writing has made all solutions

impossible.15 By rendering his own texts perennially open, Kierkegaard

supposedly frustrates any attempt by the reader and interlocutor to find

closure in the form of any one particular meaning. As with Dooley in terms

of philosophy, Poole suggests from a literary perspective the ways in which

Kierkegaard anticipates Derrida and other postmodern writers. Yet Poolesargument produces two unintended consequences that inadvertently suggest

that it is in fact possible to decant a relatively clear picture of civil society

from Kierkegaards writings. First, we may not know exactly who

Kierkegaard is or what he said or meant, but that also implies that we

cannot say for certain what he did not say or mean. When we find, for

instance, in the midst ofEither/Or, the claim that our hero, then, works for

a living (SKS3, 281; EO II 297), the secondary literature on Kierkegaard

14Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaards Ethics of Responsibility (New York:Fordham University Press, 2001) 226.15Roger Poole Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of

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would tell us this: since the claim is made by Author B, writing from the

ethical viewpoint, and since Kierkegaard himself regarded the ethical view

as superior to the aesthetic view, this statement is perhaps closer to

something that Kierkegaard would seriously propose rather than some-

thing he might oppose.16 Yet the only way we can evaluate the validity of

the statements made by the pseudonymous authors of Either/Or is to

compare them to Kierkegaards point of view; to do this, we would need to

know for certain what Kierkegaards viewpoint actually is, something Poole

says is textually impossible. What this means, however, is that at a minimum

we are not in fact prevented from conjecturing that the statement about the

hero working for a living might imply that Kierkegaard allows room for

the common, working person as a central actor in his own view of civil

society.

In and of itself, it might seem a bit shaky to base the possibility of a

Kierkegaardian framework for civil society on something that can neither beconfirmed nor denied. That is where the second unintended consequence of

Pooles argument can be put to constructive use. Pooles argument that one

right final reading is impossible for Kierkegaards texts is based on

Kierkegaards alleged acts of intentional literary subversion. Yet there is no

reason to believe that this subversion is merely or exclusively a literary

device; it can also itself be a philosophical one, intended as an instrument of

indirect edification. For Kierkegaard to have closed (or to have allowed

others to close) the meanings of his texts would have been to institutionalize

them, to have made them answers, and to shut out pre-emptively otherpossible answers that a reader may have derived. Given Kierkegaards

animus against institutions and institutionalization (discussed in more detail

below), this would in fact make his literary endeavours and his philosophical

musings, particularly as they relate to civil society, uniformly consistent and

open. As has already been hinted, Kierkegaards opposition to closed,

institutionalized frameworks of civic interaction stems from their tendency

to relieve civic actors of their ethical burdens and responsibilities, thereby

weakening the bonds that hold together civil society. Kierkegaard does not

provide the answer to what civil society is; rather, he only offers rawmaterials and possible frameworks that the morally responsible reader

might utilize in helping to build such a civil society. Kierkegaards

subversively impenetrable mysteries might in fact have an eminently

practical application.

Having situated Kierkegaard in the civil society debate of his own time

and in the textual debate of our own, we can finally return to the task of

reconstructing Kierkegaards vision of civil society. The Kierkegaardian

16For one attempt to reconstruct Kierkegaards view in the midst of the awareness thatKierkegaard may not want his view reconstructed, see Birgit Bertung, Det etiske stadium

Kierkegaards etik? in Studier i Stadier edited by Joakim Garff Tonny Aagaard and Pia



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moment in the history of civil society is very much a product of his search

for the proper alignment of citizens in relation to one another and in

relation to the political structures that governed their communities and with

which they could not help but interact. Like many of his contemporaries,

Kierkegaard assumed that establishing the right alignment would quite

possibly fix the crisis. Kierkegaards writings on this topic are full of the

awareness of change, but they are also imbued with a sense of frustration

and melancholy at the inability of the morality of his age to adequately

confront the implications of this momentous change. Terry Pinkard has

characterized Kierkegaards sense of disillusionment by arguing that

Modernity itself, so it seemed to Kierkegaard, had simply failed.17 I

would argue for a slightly different interpretation: it was not that modernity

itself had failed, but rather that, for Kierkegaard, modernity had failed to

show how it was uniquely different and better than any other historical age

at addressing the challenges and crises generated by its own characteristictemperament. Kierkegaards project, in some sense, is to make modernity

live up to its potential or to call its bluff: that is, to find a way to salvage the

subjective individual, and to find a way to remain true to the self in a time

of great slippage the essence of the perceived sense of crisis between

external events and internal elements of self-conscious, reflective identity. In

other words, Kierkegaards goal in constructing his image of society was to

find a way to make modernity at once deeply personal and socially

meaningful.

DESPAIR INTO ACTION: THE ETHICS OF SELF-

DETERMINATION

In order to understand Kierkegaards peculiar vision of civil society, one

must first understand the process by which the fundamental unit of that

society the authentic individual is constructed. This is a process that has

been extensively addressed in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard, so

here the goal is not to challenge this literature directly but merely to revisitthe many elements of the Kierkegaardian self and to reorient them toward

the context of the civil society debate. I start, then, with a question: What,

for Kierkegaard, are the sources of self-hood?18 Or more fundamentally,

17Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 17601860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002) 355.18The philosophical influences on Kierkegaard in constructing the Kierkegaardian self are a

matter of some complexity. Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and the Origins of the Postmodern

Self,European Journal of Philosophy 10 (December 2002) No. 3: 398412, for instance, argues

that Kierkegaard engages in a systematic misreading of Schlegel (406) in constructing hisvision of self-hood. See also Alastair Hannay, Having Lessing on Ones Side, in International

Kierkegaard Commentary edited by Robert L Perkins 12: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to

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why would an individual choose to pursue authentic self-hood? The answer

is not intuitively obvious. This is, after all, Kierkegaards world, a place

where, for instance, if there is a potential calamity even worse than death

itself, it is to live (SKS2, 214; EO I 220), not exactly aspiring counsel to

those in search of an authentic life. Nevertheless, for Kierkegaard, the initial

call to self-hood is part of ones life trajectory: all individuals at some point

will feel the gravity of the call to self-hood. In these moments, there is a

certain dizziness of freedom (SKS4, 365; CA 61), and a palpable sense of

despair and anxiety generated by the awareness of freedoms uncertain

potential and expansive endlessness.19 The good life, as it exists for

Kierkegaard, consists of the engaged struggle with this spirit of anxiety, and

of the desire to confront and embrace the moment of realization when one

becomes aware that something more and something greater can be created

of the self, that the self is somehow incomplete and entangled in its current

form. All human beings will experience this emotional tremor at some pointin their lives; as humans, we are compelled to self-hood as a characteristic

of our nature. Every human being, says Kierkegaard, no matter how

slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a

natural need to formulate a life-view (SKS3, 175; EO II 179).

The pull toward self-hood may be a common and universal impulse, but

Kierkegaard is quick to admit the possibility of an incomplete or inauthentic

awakening to self-hood. While there may be many people who think

themselves called, Kierkegaard notes, the stark reality is that, given the

ponderous demands of authentic self-hood, few are the chosen (SKS 2,214; EO I 220). The phrasing here is a bit cryptic, but given Kierkegaards

fervid antipathy to fatalism and ascriptive elitism, the chosen most likely

refers to those who are self-chosen, who have chosen the self. The alternative

to a life of grappling with the demands of anxiety, however, is not a life of

pleasure and comfort; rather, it is a life governed by an all-consuming sense

of despair. Despair comes from the gnawing realization that the actual self is

not the true or authentic self; that is, it is a constant reminder of the

misrelation of self (SV3 15, 76; SUD 16). The life of despair is in fact the

Hannay,Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2003) 4963). For

an interesting reading on whether Kierkegaard himself was authentically his own self, see Lis

Lind, Sren Kierkegaard sjalv: Psykoanalytiska lasningar (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2000). See

also, in general, Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self(Montreal:

McGill-Queens University Press, 1995); and Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian:

Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997).19Or, in the words of Jrgen Husted,Wilhelms brev: Det etiske iflge Kierkegaard(Copenhagen:

Gyldendal, 1999): In despair, the individual finds his self and its eternal validity (153). Axel

Hutter, Das Unvordenkliche der menschlichen Freiheit: Zur Deutung der Angst bei Schelling

und Kierkegaard, in Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, edited by

Jochem Henningfeld and Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), Kierkegaard Studies:Monograph Series 8, pp. 11732, argues that Kierkegaards ideas on anxiety and dizziness

reveal the influence of Schellings ideas among them the unprethinkable foundation of human



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inauthentic life, and for Kierkegaard, it is the life that the majority of

humankind will experience, simply because they find the experience of

despair less taxing than the uncertain and unending struggle with anxiety.20

The crisis of the age by Kierkegaards reckoning is a crisis that starts with

the individual; the misrelation of society is a collective reflection of the

misrelation of self.

Those who settle for the life of despair, who in their weakness or myopia

seem satisfied with inauthentic and incomplete self-hood, may find a sense of

solace and comfort in the outward conformity to social norms, an option

that does not reduce or eliminate the despair but merely provides

momentary (or in-the-moment) respite in the illusion (or delusion) of

fulfilment and contentedness. Such conformity may be comforting, but it is,

in effect, little more than a passive act of commiseration with other

despairing selves. Those who heed the call of self-hood, however, will shun

outward conformity and will instead seek out the constructive spirit ofinwardness. The elements of the real self, of the authentic self, are found only

in the interior architecture of subjective experience; inwardness establishes

subjectivity, and subjectivity, as an experiential occurrence, is truth.21 (SKS

7, 191; CUP 209). Subjectivity is discovered and cultivated through a

process of inwardness and introspection, a process in which solitude and

silence are essential components.22 Solitude is essential for the discovery of

self-hood, but it only contributes to authenticity and subjectivity if the

solitude is self-imposed and voluntary choice is absolutely essential here.

This is why Kierkegaard condemned the enforced silence of solitary

20One of the central elements of Kierkegaards philosophy is the idea of the stages or spheres in

the life of the individual. While these are often referred to as the three stages the aesthetic, the

ethical, and the religious there is far more complexity here than the trajectory from least to

most authentic and meaningful would suggest. There does seem to be a purposive and

dialectical trajectory in the progression from stage to stage, but Kierkegaard continuously

grapples with the question of whether the process of moral upbuilding and ethical evolution is

a self-willed, voluntary process or one propelled by grace (allowing also for the possibility that

self-will itself is a product of grace). Generally speaking, there is more despair in the earlier

stages than in the later, though despair pervades each of the stages in different ways and invarying degrees. Despair can generate both religious and moral/ethical consequences;

Kierkegaards theological perspectives on upbuilding have been studied in detail, but it is

the moral-ethical consequences that are of central concern in civil society. On the stages, see, for

instance, Anders Kingo, Analogiens teologi: En dogmatik studie over dialektikken i Soren

Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab (Copenhagen: GEC Gad, 1995); Birgit

Bertung,Den dialektiske svven: studier i Sren Kierkegaards begreber om dialektik, tro og vilje

(Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1998), esp. 308.21Cf. Silvia Saviano Sampaio, Kierkegaard: A ambigu idade da imaginacao,Trans/Form/Acao

26(1) (2003) 8796: It is the category of inwardness that allows the imaginative-passion of the

aesthetic to be transformed into the concrete imaginative-passion of the subjective thinker,

because it is inwardness that directs the passion not toward an external infinity but toward aninfinity within the self (93).22For a more in depth study see Stephen N Dunning Kierkegaards Dialectic of Inwardness: A

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confinement in prisons (Pap. 47 viii I A 40; P/J258;SKS7, 11;CUP 8) and

why he argued against the obligatory, institutionalized silence of monastic

retreats23 (SV3 17, 60; FSE 15). Solitude and silence are antidotes to the

endless waves of anxiety freedoms disclosure to itself as possibility (SKS

4, 413; CA 111) and the necessary tools for learning that subjectivity is

truth and subjectivity is actuality (SKS7, 314;CUP 343). Yet inwardness

is not necessarily a site of complacency, refuge, or comfort: inwardness and

spirit is indeed always like a stranger and a foreigner in a body (SKS7, 218;

CUP240), and hence, one is constantly thrown off guard and disoriented by

the unpredictable challenges that anxiety, as the uncertain potentiality of

freedom, continually presents.

Significantly for Kierkegaard, because the call to authentic self-hood is

generally a human compulsion, it is a process and experiential pathway that

should be open to all, regardless of class or gender. The single individual can

be anyone and everyone (SV3 18, 160; POV115), and so the realm of self-hood has no predestined group, no elect, and no exclusive class basis.

Kierkegaard does point out that both men and women have an equal

capacity for the rigours of inwardness, even if they may not actually exhibit

that capacity in practice (SV3 12, 136; WL138). Kierkegaard also employs

his irascible sense of humour to refute many of the objections of his

contemporaries about the presumed inferior capacities of women in

obtaining authentic self-hood.24 A woman, many of his contemporaries

argue, is only half a self, or half a person, who must find completeness in

matrimony with her husband, who is presumably a whole self. Kierkegaardlampoons this idea by pointing out the comic sight of a man courting a

23The choice of the prison and the monastery is significant, as Kierkegaards inwardness and the

subjectivity it generates have both a secular and a religious component, which would seem to be

inseparable. Yet Kierkegaards civil society is not, as we shall see, a community of believers,

and it does not need the institution of the church any more than it needs the institution of the

state. What Kierkegaards civil society requires are individuals who cultivate subjectivity

through the practice of inwardness; the personal element of religious devotion that inwardness

produces need not impinge upon or compromise the simultaneous expression of inwardness as

public, civic behaviour. The two elements in fact act as complementary attributes of the publicand the private spheres in Kierkegaards civil society.24There is an ongoing and unresolved debate on whether or not Kierkegaards views on gender

are egalitarian and liberating, or patriarchal and oppressive. Irena Makarushka, Reflections on

the Other in Dinesen, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in Kierkegaard on Art and Communica-

tion, edited by George Pattison (New York: St Martins Press, 1992) 1509, for instance, argues

that Kierkegaards world-view rejects women and suppresses difference in order to sustain the

single-minded duty-bound commitment to the patriarchal order of universal truth (158). On

the other hand, Wanda Warren Berry, Finally Forgiveness: Kierkegaard as a Springboard

for a Feminist Theology of Reform, in Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community:

Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, edited by George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans

(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992) 196217, argues that Kierkegaards views ongender are profoundly liberating for women. See also the collection of essays in Feminist

Interpretations of Sren Kierkegaard edited by Celine Leon and Sylvia Walsh (University Park



12/28

woman, a process in which the man, who has enjoyed social esteem as a

whole man, in fact betrays that he is but half a person (SKS6, 46; SLW

43). As in matrimony, so too with inwardness are men and women equally

incomplete selves in search of completeness and authenticity. Still,

Kierkegaard is no radical feminist. Humour aside, about all we can say

with any certainty is that Kierkegaards vision of authentic self-hood, and

along with it of civil society, appears to be far more open and accessible to

women (and other non-dominant groups) than those of either Ferguson or

Hegel.

Even if an individual were able to withstand the anxious depths of

inwardness required to establish a nascent sense of self-hood, Kierkegaard

makes it clear that the process ofmaintaining self-hood, once established, is

no less arduous. The lapse into despair is a continuous threat to all

individuals, regardless of what stage of self-hood they may have obtained;

and since no self can actually achieve perfection or an absolute point ofcompletion there is no perfect human being the process of self-

maintenance creates a responsibility that is a heavy, continuous, and life-

long burden (SV3 15, 110; SUD 54). Self-maintenance is also more than

mere mental reflection; it is additionally a pattern of concrete action. That

is, inwardness may be a contemplative state, but thought-reality must never

be confused with experiential actuality (indeed, this is one of the points that

Kierkegaard makes in a critique of Kant)25 (SKS7, 299300, 303;CUP 328,

3312). What sorts of things can one do to maintain and strengthen the self?

Generally speaking, since the inauthentic life of despair is also a life ofseductive comfort in the shell of social conformity, one must continually

resist and shake off that which is habitual, ritual or socially comforting. One

should speak a foreign language, for instance, merely to disorient

[entfremdet] the self from the habit of speaking ones own language26

(Pap. 41 iii A 97, 41 iii A 155156; P/J138, 141). Or else one could cultivate

the subjective virtue of arbitrariness: One sees the middle of the play, for

example, or one reads the third section of the book (SKS2, 288;EO I 299).

Random acts of arbitrariness, even when as here they are invoked by

the unenlightened aesthete, complement Kiekegaards insistence thatauthentic civic actors must resist the feigned completeness of totalizing

forms of discourse or the tendency of humans to devolve into fatalistic

25See Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1992), who argues that Kierkegaard, though he rarely mentions Kant and

when he does it is in a critical voice, in fact borrows heavily from Kant, and may even

intentionally or unconsciously have tried to conceal this debt.26This is not as odd or eccentric as it may at first seem. It can be compared, for instance, with

Thomas Franck, The Empowered Self: Law and Society in the Age of Individualism (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999), who argues that ethical selves do not identify an alien other;they identify with the alien other (1). The continual cultivation of consciously chosen

characteristics and of empathetic bonds with different others is for Franck the foundation of

404 DARREN C. ZOOK


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force behind the progressive evolution of the Hegelian system is nothing

other than the mechanistic motions of historical time, a process which

obviates the potential for human agency and freedom.31 Kierkegaard is thus

staunchly opposed to any kind of automatic historical transition, and states

firmly that to become subjective, one must disregard . . . the idea that

becoming world-historical is quantitatively dialectical (SKS 7, 131; CUP

141). Kierkegaard also rejects what he perceives to be the Hegelian

suppression of the individual to the greater interest of the nation-state.

Because Hegel supposedly abstracts humanity to the aggregate level of the

(national) crowd, the spark of individuality and self-hood found in

subjectivity is dulled and dampened, and hence the individual is lost, and

along with him/her, any possibility for true ethics. The automatic historical

telos of Hegelianism is therefore literally de-moralizing. As Kierkegaard

points out, any blockhead [ethvert F] can shout slogans of the crowd or

of the nation an act which requires neither inwardness nor freedom (SKS7, 136;CUP 146). Kierkegaard also cannot help but point out what he feels

is the inhumanity of the Hegelian system, since in terms of historical time, it

is necessarily predicated on a useless, divine squandering of multiple

generations, just to get the dialectic moving (SKS7, 147; CUP 158). In the

end, Kierkegaard sums up his critique and his own alternative blueprint for

authentic self-hood by an inversion of the Hegelian project:

[The] Hegelian can say with all solemnity: I do not know whether I am a

human being but I have understood the system. I prefer to say: I know that Iam a human being, and I know that I have not understood the system.

(SKS7, 283; CUP311)

The Hegelian system thus fails in its promise of a better and morally

improved world, according to Kierkegaard, because it is based on a self-

deception that allows the individual to evade responsibility for any social

malaise or to blame objective determinants for ones own lack of moral

responsibility, without which there cannot be a subjective, authentic self.

Kierkegaards authentic self is one that remains as open-ended as the textshe writes. From the Kierkegaardian point of view, the Hegelians err greatly

because they seek to institutionalize the construction of the self, rendering it

31In other words, by abstracting humanity, Hegel supposedly confuses essence with existence.

Kierkegaard may have been borrowing from other well-known critiques in reaching this

conclusion, rather than addressing Hegels ideas directly. According to Lore Hu hn, Sprung in

Ubergang: Kierkegaards Kritik an Hegel im Ausgang von der Spa tphilosophie Schellings, in

Kierkegaard und Schelling: Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit, edited by Jochem Henningfeld and

Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 8, pp.13383, Schellings later critique of Hegel is in some ways the foundation for Kierkegaards,

even though Kierkegaard eventually became disenchanted with Schelling and ultimately parted

406 DARREN C. ZOOK


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closed and thus complete. In Kierkegaards world, the burdens of self-hood

can never and should never end.

THE JOKE IS ON YOU: THE SELF IN SOCIETY

The principled and exhaustive act of individual self-determination may be

one of the central themes running throughout Kierkegaards vast textual

archive, but it is never, in and of itself, the endpoint of moral endeavour;

that is, the authentic self, as a work in progress, always has a larger

purpose or plan toward which to aspire. A great deal of analytical work

has been dedicated to the moralistic, evolutionary trajectory that

supposedly marks the progress of the Kierkegaardian self as it aspires

toward the ecstasy of religious life. Far less attention has been given to the

practical ethics of the Kierkegaardian self, and the way it is meant tocirculate through and within society at large on an everyday basis. This,

however, is of central importance, for it is here that Kierkegaards

response to the crisis of culture of his own time begins to take shape.

Kierkegaards ideal society was not a contemplative elite, a select group of

philosopher-kings continuously pondering profound answers to eternal

questions. Kierkegaard meant for the authentic self to be not only a life

worth living, but also a life that was possible to live attainable for

commoner and noble alike.32 The individual who answers the call for

authentic self-hood must of necessity enter, or re-enter, society continuallyto refine the task of ethical self-hood namely, to transform himself into

the universal individual (SKS 3, 2489; EO II 261). The universal

individual is usually assumed to coincide with the religious life, but as I

shall argue, it can also be the foundation for the enlightened citizen of civil

society.33

The individual self may have to withdraw from society initially to seek out

the contemplative nature of inwardness, but to remain in such a state would

be to push beyond the state of self-awareness and even self-love and into the

realm of self-intoxication and narcissism (SV3 17, 132; JFY 97). Theauthentic self is tempered and restrained, in fact, through the cultivation of

authentic social virtues, so that for the self, the objective is not only a

32Without doubt, the best argument in favour of Kierkegaards non-elite vision of philosophical

life is Jrgen Bukdahl, Sren Kierkegaard og den menige mand (Copenhagen: Munksgaard,

1961), recently made available in an English translation by Bruce H. Kirmmse under the title

Sren Kierkegaard and the Common Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).33Yet enlightenment for Kierkegaard is not necessarily synonymous with rationality. If, as is

pointed out by Johs. P. Almar, Sren Kierkegaard: Eksistensfilosofien, Eksistenspdegogikken

og Eksistentialpdegogikken (Odense: Universitetsforlag, 1986), the result of the humanitieswill be the absorption of humankind into an existence that is governed by rational

comprehension (155) then Kierkegaard is either not a humanistic thinker or else represents



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personal self but a social, civic [borgerligt] self34 (SKS3, 250; EO II 263).

This is not the realm of a Robinson Crusoe type of individualism, where a

person can exist as an island and shun all human contact.35This is a realm

where the self is required to interact with and impinge upon the social

motions of civil society, a place to break the silence of inwardness and

articulate the self into society.36 Note, however, that given Kierkegaards

association of the despairing life with the outer shell of social conformity,

this aspect is not an invitation merely to go through the motions of polite

society. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, [t]he principle of sociality is precisely

illiberal (SKS7, 12;CUP 8), by which he means that the non-reflective and

habitual sociality prevalent in his time, by being neither voluntarily chosen

nor consciously experienced, is in fact self-destructive.37 The loneliness of

inwardness, even in its moralized form offered by Kierkegaard, may be

partially alleviated by social, civic interaction; but such interaction can never

be entirely comfortable, and the self can never completely assimilate tosociality, for to do so would be to lose the very individuality that authentic

self-hood requires. Put differently, to be comfortable is to be closed.

How, then, is one to engage in the practice of everyday life without

compromising the project of self-determination? If the mode of the

individual self is inwardness, then the mode of the self in movement

through society is irony. There are multiple varieties of irony in

Kierkegaards writings, and all of them have a correspondingly varied

(though not equally effective) manner of social engagement. Regardless of

the type of irony, however, irony remains, for Kierkegaard, a way of life, a

34Note that in spite of Kierkegaards differences with and opposition to the Hegelian schools,

the Danish word borgerligt (fr. German burgerliche) is retained.35Perhaps not Crusoe, but Quixote may work as a model for Kierkegaards civic hero: see Eric

J. Ziolkowski, Don Quixote and Kierkegaards Understanding of the Single Individual in

Society, in Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community, edited by Connell and Evans,

13043.36Cf. Daro Gonza lez, La voix transfigure e, in Kierkegaard aujourdhui: Recherches

kierkegaardiennes au Danemark et en France, edited by Jacques Caron (Odense: Odense

University Press, 1998) 12541:To break the silence is in this case to render it ambiguous, to linger for a few moments

in its interior in order to recognize the impossibility of a pure silence and to place it in

opposition to hermetic silence and to religious silence.

(132)

37Kierkegaard here shares in common with Ferguson and Hegel an intolerance of the idea of

politeness as an empty, unreflective ritual; significantly, however, all three arrive at this

position for different reasons. For Ferguson, politeness lacks the necessary vigor required for

competitive civic interaction, and hence leads to an effeminate, weaker form of civil society.

For Hegel, ritual politeness is a form of Moralitat, the excessively subjective, formalized

adherence to norms, as opposed to the intersubjective (and objective) cultivation ofSittlichkeit(ethics) necessary for his proper vision of civil society (PRx33). For Kierkegaard, non-reflective

politeness is a wasted opportunity for self cultivation and a useless waste of time for all

408 DARREN C. ZOOK


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way of continuously engaging and disengaging the social patterns of civic

interaction and social discourse. It engages civic discourse to the extent that

irony in speech requires one to speak in a common idiom that is shared by

both the speaker and the listener.38 At the same time, the use of irony

undermines the pretence of control or power over the meaning of civic

discourse and social parlance, thereby disengaging the speaker as a civic

participant and freeing her or him from the proclivity to conform to social

practice and from the hegemony of social ritual. Social interaction is thus a

sort of game, or a form of play, in which the authentic self simultaneously

participates in and disengages from society as a necessary part of the

authenticating process. Since social interaction is necessary for everyone as a

sort of school of self-cultivation, social and civic interaction thus benefits

not only the self but all others potentially engaged in the process of self-

determination. Kierkegaard is always aware of the danger of the seductive

powers of conformist society, and continually cautions against the declineinto formulaic behaviour or the need for social recognition. The phrase

know yourself means: separate yourself from the other (SKS 1, 225; CI

177), says Kierkegaard, and irony is the mode that ensures that such

separation will occur.39 Without irony, there is no separation or disengage-

ment, and without separation or disengagement, one merely returns to the

despairing life of social conformity and ritualistic civility.

Irony may be a sort of game that shows a lack of seriousness in the ways

of social and civic interaction, but it is not always and necessarily a form of

deceit; irony is not the same thing as lying. Irony is different and distinctfrom humour, though both play an important role; that is, irony alone is not

enough, and humour is its necessary complement. Nevertheless, as a sort of

game, it may also be a source of amusement, which for Kierkegaard means

that one way the individual can affirm the ironic mode and guard against the

seductive powers of social conformity is to behave in such a way as to elicit

laughter.40 Indeed, according to Kierkegaard, this should be one of the

goals for the cultivated ironist, for laughter is necessary for legitimacy and

authenticity in self-hood, and to be able to get others to laugh at oneself is a

38According to Adam Diderichsen,Den sarede Odysseus: Kierkegaard og subjektivitetens genese

(Copenhagen, Hans Reitzels, 1998), irony thus opens the potential narrow-mindedness and

solipsism of inwardness. Such an ethical recognition of the other requires the subject to be able

to open the self for the other in communication. Only in so far as the subject opens his world for

the other can a common world be established (191).39For a detailed look at the influence of Hellenistic philosophy (know yourself) on

Kierkegaards ideas regarding (Socratic) irony and religiosity, see Sophia Scopetea,Kierkegaard

og grciteten: En kamp med ironi (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1995), esp. 31119 (on distance

and sympathy, or the need to disengage in order to engage).40On this, see John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaards Thought(New York: St Martins

Press, 2000). For an interesting interpretation of Kierkegaards humour in action, see thethesis by Peter Vogelsang, Oprecht veinzen: Over Kierkegaards Over Het Begrip ironie, vooral

met betrkking tot Socrates (Groningen: Groningen University Press 1999) who argues that



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form of tutoring (SV3 18, 159; POV 11415). This is not the type of

laughter associated with silly guffaws or the ability to tell a popular joke;

this is a complex laughter that reaffirms for the self that one has exposed a

crack in the facade of social conformity and ritualistic politeness, and hence

has revealed another moment of freedom, another moment of anxiety, and

another moment where the ethics of self-hood can be cultivated through

voluntary choice. A complex sense of humour reminds the self that it is

always a participant anda spectator to civil society, and that engagement

with civil society must always remain a voluntary choice (for otherwise it

would be merely a compulsion) thus a complex sense of ethics requires a

complex sense of humour. The ability to elicit this laughter from others

without feeling bitterness or the shame of ridicule is an affirmation of true

self-cultivation. Much of Kierkegaards humour has its roots in the humour

of the ironist (which is to be distinguished from that of the jester):

An ironist who is in the majority is eo ipsoa mediocre ironist. Wanting to be in

the majority is a wish that springs from immediacy. Irony is suspect to both

left and right. A true ironist has therefore never been in the majority. Unlike

the jester.

(Pap. 46 vii I A 64; P/J211)

Yet there is also a realm of humour beyond that of irony that seems to imply

that laughter is a force to be taken seriously in the construction of self and

society.Obviously, then, there is a subversive quality to the ironic mode, if done

properly, and to the cultivation of laughter, both of which would seem to

compromise the very idea that Kierkegaard would in any way support the

idea of civil society. Yet as we have seen, Kierkegaards hero has never been

only an isolated individual; the authentic self has always had a larger

mission, which has been to engage and re-engage society to pursue the

endless task of social reform and civic reconstruction. Self-determination

may be the essential antecedent to this larger project, but self-hood is in no

way to be conflated with unbridled individualism, nor is it meant as a licencefor the anarchic impulse to dismantle or destroy the elements of public life.

Transgressing social norms, causing offence, and eliciting laughter are

certainly meant to destabilize the ritualistic patters of civic and social

engagement, but they are also done in order remoralize society by calling

attention to the conformity and collectivization of social life and to the

retrogression of civic (and Christian) society into an empty display of

bourgeois-philistinism [spidsborgerlighed] (SV3 17, 219; JFY199). Kierke-

gaards vision of a re-moralized and ethically rejuvenated civil society is

every bit as demanding as the renovation of the interior architecture of the

re-christened authentic self: one distances oneself from social norms to

simultaneously undermine and rebuild them; one simultaneously obeys and

410 DARREN C. ZOOK


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foundations, and to separate ethical substance from hollow ritual.

Uncertainty, and the anxiety it evokes, are necessary elements in the

construction and cultivation of a truly principled civil society. (As with the

individual self, so, too, with society: certainty and comfort remain indicators

of the closure.) Yet this is not the uncertainty of violent revolution or

wanton anarchy. Indeed, what is quite clear from Kierkegaards writings on

the process of social reconstruction is that it is a process that will only work

in the context of a society which tolerates and even encourages dissent.41 In

other words, in spite of the seemingly irreverent nature of many of

Kierkegaards prescriptions, he remains in the end, even if he does not say it

explicitly, a staunch proponent of classic liberalism.42

Perhaps the central text in Kierkegaards archive that illuminates this

point is his short treatise entitled A Literary Review [En literair Anmeldelse].

The main object of critique in this treatise is the social phenomenon known

as the crowd [mngde].43 As Kierkegaard has stated in many of his works,the crowd is nothing other than the collection of inauthentic selves that

constitutes public or, more accurately, polite society.44 That sort of public

society, however, is an illusion, for true civil society requires individuality, a

characteristic of authentic self-hood, and since authentic self-hood is based

on subjectivity, and since subjectivity is truth, the crowd is therefore the

manifestation of untruth (SV3 18, 152; POV 106). The authentic self

can move through and even participate in society, but should never

be concerned with approval or disapproval of the crowd because that

would imply dependence and even enslavement to the crowds conformist,

41Cf. Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture: What

Kierkegaard seems to be offering now is no longer the unnameable mystery of a sublime void at

the heart of the city, but the prospect of exodus and a call to counter-culture (219).42As Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, points out, where Kierkegaard appears

critical of liberalism, he is not attacking liberalism per se but rather the way in which the term is

used by the self-declared liberals of Copenhagen. There is an interesting parallel here:

Kierkegaard does not attack Hegel so much as the way the Danish Hegelians put Hegel to use,

and similarly does not attack liberalism but merely the way Danish liberals allegedly misuse and

misunderstand it. Still, Kirmmse is probably most accurate in stating that Kierkegaard here is

best seen neither as liberal nor as conservative, but merely as radical (278).43Kierkegaards crowd should not be confused with the crowd of collective action that proved

so worrisome to conservatives in the nineteenth century. Kierkegaards crowd includes

individuals of all classes who interact in public; the menacing spectre of the collective-action

crowd consisted of the dangerous classes. Two classic studies of such crowds and the fears they

produced are Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses (Paris: Perrin, 1992

[reprint]); and George Rude, The Crowd in History: a Study of Popular Disturbances in France

and England 17301848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981).44As George Pattison, Poor Paris! Kierkegaards Critique of the Spectacular City (Berlin,

Walter de Gruyter, 1999), Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 2, also points out, the crowd

is obviously an urban phenomenon, and so in many ways Kierkegaards critique is specifically a

critique of urban life. Pattison describes the de-moralizing power of the urban crowd: Eventsunroll as the result of a sequence of evasions and abdications of responsibility, underlying which

is the intimidating presence of the statistical the numerical mass the undifferentiated crowd



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anti-individualistic norms.45 Truth can only be an individual, and never a

collective phenomenon, and hence the authentic individual shuns the crowd

more than the young virtuous girl shuns a low dancehall (SV318, 155;POV

109). The authentic self therefore serves as an intentionally unsettling

reminder to others of their own inauthenticity and despair; the authentic self

therefore accepts the heavy burdens of always being simultaneously a part

of and apart from civil society.46

The extended critique in Kierkegaards Literary Review does not

denounce and excoriate the very idea of civil society, but rather seeks to

provide a solution to save civil society from its current state. Kierkegaard, in

other words, wants to offer an alternative plan that can reconstruct civil

society and transform it from its current manifestation as an undiffer-

entiated, conformist crowd into a collocation of authentic, individual selves.

That, suggests Kierkegaard, is what civil society was meant to be. The

revolutionary transformation proposed by Kierkegaard, however, is not aviolent one, but must be necessarily a civil, non-violent transformation.47

Indeed, Kierkegaard offers a critique of violent political behaviour that

condemns revolutionary action as unprincipled, uncivil and self-destruc-

tive.48 In moments where individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (that

is, without the individual, inward-directed singling out), we get violence,

unruliness, unbridledness . . . People then push and shove, and rub up

against each other in futile outwardness. There is none of that modesty of

inwardness that decently distances the one from the other (SV3 14, 589;

LR55). Revolutionary violence is therefore not possible in societies in which

45On this point there is another crucial difference with Hegel. Hegel proposes that members of

civil society be grouped into corporations based roughly on profession and trade; doing so

provides not merely added security, but also public recognition from others and hence honor

(PRx 253). For Kierkegaard, both the institutionalization of the corporation, and the need for

public recognition, undermine the possibility of an authentically civil society.46Klaus M. Kodalle, Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen: Kritik des Wunschdenkens und der

Zweckrationalitat im Anschlu an Kierkegaard (Paderborn: Ferdinand Scho ningh, 1988), goes

so far as to say that Kierkegaards version of civil consciousness is thus structurally

schizophrenic (170).47Cf. Niels Thomassen, Ulykke og lykke: Et livsfilosofisk udspil med stadigt hensyn til Sren

Kierkegaard(Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 2001): Conflict is the central ethical problem, that is, the

concern of the ethical can be identified as the prevention and the resolution of conflict through

civilized means (151). There is also here a not-so-indirect attack by Kierkegaard on another

school of thought that was on the rise at the time: communism. According to Anton Hu gli,

Kierkegaard und der Kommunismus, in Materialen zur Philosophie Soren Kierkegaards, edited

by Michael Theunissen and Wilfred Greve (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979) 51138, Kierkegaards

understanding of communism was based on popular press and newspaper accounts, and not on

any of the central texts of the chief ideologues. This would accord well with the observation of

Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, that Marxism and communism had not yet

made significant headway into Copenhagens political atmosphere (271).48See, on this point, Charles K. Bellinger, The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation,

Freedom and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001) which is more centrally about

412 DARREN C. ZOOK


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meaningful bonds of civility are created and maintained between

authentically realized and differentiated self-citizens. The crowd, or the

public, however, as it existed among Kierkegaards contemporaries, seemed

in fact to militate against the very possibility of such a virtuous civil

society. Keeping in mind that the majority of society for Kierkegaard was

composed of those who lived despairing lives made bearable only by the

hollow comforts of conformity, we can begin to see the potentially

compounded dangers when despairing, conformist individuals congregate:

Someone who, with actual persons in the contemporaneity of the actual

moment and situation, has no opinion of his own adopts the majoritys

opinion, or, if more inclined to be combative, the minoritys. But note that the

majority and the minority are actual human beings, and this is why resorting

to them is supportive. The public, however, is an abstraction.

(SV3 14, 84; LR 82)

The public is an abstraction because it has no differentiation within, and it

has no differentiation because it has an insufficient number of authentic

selves to give it a self-reflective identity. To conform to the publics opinion,

whether of the majority or the minority, is therefore nothing less than

treacherous consolation.

An inauthentic civil society, then, as the undifferentiated crowd or public,

is not just philosophically problematic, it is pragmatically unsettling. The

crowd is deceptively simple it can become the very opposite and is stillthe same (SV3 14, 84; LR 82) and also self-consuming and dangerous:

The public is all and nothing, it is the most dangerous of all powers and the

most meaningless . . . [It is] the cruel abstraction by which individuals will be

religiously educated or destroyed (SV3 14, 85; LR 83). There is thus an

added sense of urgency and necessity for those who have made the leap to

embrace the anxiousness of authentic self-hood: certainly self-determination

and self-cultivation are their own rewards, but the fruits of such actions exist

in contemporaneous social practice by resisting the drift toward social and

revolutionary violence among the people or the tendency towardauthoritarian violence by the state. How does self-determination play out

in practice in this regard? In spite of Kierkegaards suggestion that the

authentic individual should exhibit behaviour that elicits laughter from the

public crowd, the ironic mode of social interaction is, for all its all its aura of

disengagement, a serious and intentional act of reciprocal interaction. An

ironist can only be understood and effective if he or she is comprehensible,

at least in part, to an interlocutor, who may or may not be also an ironist,

but who is nevertheless a necessary part of the ironic exchange.49 The ironic

49Indeed, irony without an interlocutor becomes narcissism, and the ironist who remains

enclosed in the comforts of interior silence becomes what for Kierkegaard is the demonic



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inauthentic patterns of civic practice. Private charity is therefore essential in

Kierkegaards vision of civil society.

For Kierkegaard, then, while the authentic individual approaches society

in an ironic mode, he or she also does so with a sense of compassion and

even (spiritual) love that regards other individuals, authentic or not, rich or

poor, as civic neighbours.53 Here, again, there is a crucial difference between

Kierkegaards vision of civil society and that of Hegel and Ferguson. For

Hegel and Ferguson, the necessary counterpoint to civic interaction is the

relation to the state itself; for Kierkegaard, the focus remains continuously

on the bonds that link selves to others in the civic neighbourhood.

Kierkegaards neighbourhood, however, is a rather large one, for

neighbour is often the same as human being, and for Kierkegaard,

human beings are duty-bound (religiously in fact) to love their neighbours

universally and humanly (SV3 12, 140; WL 143). This would seem to push

Kierkegaard in the direction of (Kantian) cosmopolitanism. Significantly, acrucial distinction is made here between neighbours on the one hand and

friends on the other. Friendship, as well as erotic love for that matter, is a

form of preferential love [forkjrlighed], and preferential love is inferior to

universal love because preferential love is inherently discriminatory; it is

dependent upon the construction of closed boundaries that include some

and exclude others (SV3 12, 58, 62; WL 53, 57). Neighbourly love, as non-

preferential love, is also the basis for a re-moralized civil society. It is not the

case that one cannot have any real friends. On the contrary, though

Kierkegaard cautions the authentic individual to guard against the perils offriendship, he also points out that ethical friendship is not only possible but

necessary for the further advancement of self-determination. The person

who views friendship ethically sees it, then, as a duty. Therefore, I could say

it is every persons duty to have a friend (SKS3, 304; EO II 322). Ethical

friendship is permissible because it creates an open boundary between the

categories of friend and neighbour Kierkegaard even rephrases his claim

that it is every (ethical) persons duty to have a friend as it is every human

beings duty to become open (SKS 3, 304; EO II 322) and loving all

individuals as neighbours is necessary to prevent the closing of the boundaryand creating an exclusive realm of preferential and selfish (narcissistic) love

(SV3 12, 49; WL 44).

There is one final criticism to consider in evaluating the virtues of

Kierkegaards vision of civil society. As Peter George points out, the duty to

love ones neighbours can also be seen as cold and emotionless, as more

about the self than the neighbour: A person can act in a loving way towards

53Kierkegaards emphasis on love, and its relationship to inwardness and sociality, remained a

central theme in existentialist literature. See Walter A. Davis, Inwardness and Existence:Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1989): If love asks us to root out our inauthenticities it also shows us how powerfully they are

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his neighbour out of a sense of duty, but he cannot feel love towards his

neighbour, only from a sense of duty.54 Civil society requires that all

actions of civic actors be purely voluntary, and so Kierkegaards insistence

on duties seems to create a situation in which we are compelled to

volunteer a rather egregious contradiction, at first glance. Yet the

compelling power that holds us to our duties does not emanate from the

state or some other external actor, but rather from the cultivation of

authentic self-hood, making it a self-imposed duty and therefore allowing

for a reconciliation with the requisite principle of voluntarism. Kierke-

gaards continual emphasis on empathy and compassion as motives for civic

engagement also guards against cold, impersonal interaction and indeed

seems to require of all civic actors an exhausting degree of continual

emotional commitment. The key element remains for Kierkegaard the idea

of openness both of self and of society. Civil society is only possible in its

full and meaningful sense when its various boundaries remain open andfluid.55 Kierkegaards vision of civil society is thus a collection of individuals

whom we would treat equally as neighbours and all of whom would have the

equal opportunity to become our friends. Put differently, the authentic

individual can still maintain social relations, even deep and meaningful ones,

but such an individual should avoid circulating only within an exclusive

group of friends (or any other closed group such as ethnic, racial, etc.), for

not only would the authentic individual fail to develop any further, but

also, the moral and ethical potential of civil society would be greatly

weakened for all individuals.56

54Peter George, Something Anti-social in Works of Love, in Kierkegaard: The Self in Society,

edited by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (New York: St Martins Press, 1998) 73. See

also on this point Louise Carroll Keeley, Subjectivity and World in Works of Love, in

Foundations of Kierkegaards Vision of Community, edited by Connell and Evans, 96108; and

Jason Wirth, Empty Community: Kierkegaard on Being with You, in The New Kierkegaard,

edited by Elsebet Jegstrup (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) 21423, characteriz-

ing neighbourly love as a love fraught with the earthquakes of singularity and the impossibility

of love taking stock properly of all its responsibilities (220).55Kierkegaards argument here resonates with many contemporary debates in political

philosophy. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), for instance, argues that group rights are essential to

protect minority cultures, for those cultures provide the necessary elements to make life

meaningful for individuals within those minority cultures. Kymlicka does impose various

conditions: individuals within those communities must have the right to leave their minority

cultures, for instance, and minority cultures must not engage in illiberal behaviour that

undermines the rights of other communities. One could argue, then, from Kymlickas or

Kierkegaards point of view, that minority cultures can be authentic or entitled to rights only to

the extent that they remain fluid and open.56See, on this point, Martin J. Matustk, Kierkegaards Radical Existential Praxis, or, Why the

Individual Defies Liberal, Communitarian, and Postmodern Categories, in Kierkegaard in

Post/Modernity, edited by Martin J. Matustk and Merold Westphal (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1995) 23964. In the same vein, Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard and

MacIntyre: Possibilities for Dialogue in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom



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CONCLUSION

Kierkegaards framework for a reconstructed and re-moralized civil society,

based as it is first on the project of an authentic, subjective, individualistic

self-hood and second on the mutual and ironic interaction of that self with

public society, is a framework that requires exhaustive dedication and

commitment as well as ponderous ethical burdens. Yet the arduous

demands requested from the individual, demands that may at first glance

appear to be haplessly impractical products of Kierkegaards idiosyncratic

world, may also be traced to the sense of urgency and crisis in the face of

another rival claimant for the subjectivity of the self: the encroaching state.

As Tine Damsholt points out, the Danish state, like so many other

European states, had been directing its energies in earnest at capturing the

hearts and minds of concrete individuals at least from the latter half of the

eighteenth century, largely through practices of ceremonial ritual andinstitutional discipline aimed at transforming subjects of the self into

subjects of the state. A central element in the subjectivizing process,

Damsholt notes, was the formation of the patriotic gaze that could

undermine the judgment of the concrete individual.57 Kierkegaards

warnings against the ritualization of civic life, and his radical designs to

keep the self awake to the process of self-determination, may have been

formulated with the design of rendering the self perpetually open and

independent against the attempts of the state to render the self closed and

hence dependent. Whereas Hegel is searching for the underlying unitybetween civil society and the state, Kierkegaard eschews such unity as

evidence of non-reflective conformity, and indeed, seems to provide an

indirect critique of nationalism; and whereas Hegel opines that ultimately

the contradictions created by the evolution of civil society will resolve into

new and useful categories, Kierkegaard embraces such contradictions for

they are precisely the obstacles needed to prevent the closure of social

boundaries. From another angle, this helps to explain why Kierkegaard, in

contrast to the Hegelians, believed that only an inauthentic or incomplete

civil society needed the state to cultivate its collective identity.Kierkegaard argued adamantly and passionately that his ideas were

meant to be lived, and not merely read or pondered. Trying to fashion an

individual who was more than merely an abstract Hegelian cog in the

dialectical machine, and more than a Fergusonian crafty competitor in the

spectacle of public power-struggles, Kierkegaard crafted a counter-hero

who actively and consciously struggled internally and externally for

2001) 191210, concedes that Kierkegaards vision of self-hood was perhaps too radical and too

demanding, but argues that critics such as MacIntyre who write off Kierkegaard as yet another

apologist for the (destructive) rights of self over community misunderstand Kierkegaardsconcerns for the structure and stability of community life.57Tine Damsholt Fdrelandskrlighed og borgerdyd: Patriotisk diskurs og militre reformer i

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the irony of it all - darren zook

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