A Critical Estimate Of Søren Kierkegaard’s Notion Of The Individual -- By: Edmund P. Clowney

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 05:1 (Nov 1942)
Article: A Critical Estimate Of Søren Kierkegaard’s Notion Of The Individual
Author: Edmund P. Clowney


A Critical Estimate Of Søren Kierkegaard’s Notion Of The Individual

Edmund P. Clowney

“AND yet, if I were to desire an inscription for my tombstone, I should desire none other than ‘That Individual’ — if that is not now understood, it surely will be.”1 In these words Søren Kierkegaard himself declares the basic importance of the category of the Individual in his life work. If we fail to justify his confidence by understanding it, we may well skip over his tombstone, for his significance as a thinker will be lost to us.

Through all his works Kierkegaard himself traces one main movement. It is a movement from the esthetic and from the speculative through the ethical to the religious. In understanding the place of the concept of the Individual in Kierkegaard’s thought, it will be necessary to understand it in the terms of this movement.

The reigning philosophy in the Copenhagen of Kierkegaard’s day was Hegelianism. S. K. himself had studied it, not only in Denmark, but also in Germany. But while deeply impressed with the brilliance and ingenuity of the System, Kierkegaard never agreed with what he considered to be its central essence, that logic and existence are one, and that the movement of world history is the movement of logical necessity. To bring movement into logic, argues Kierkegaard, is to introduce confusion into the categories and to talk nonsense. Existence is concrete and logic is abstract: the two may not be united. Reality, therefore, is not to be found in a speculative world process, but in existence: not in mere external existence, but in the existence of the ethical Individual. The core of Kierkegaard’s attack upon Hegel is

found, then, in his concept of the Individual. It would be self-contradictory, reasons S. K., to refute the System from a system, and all speculation is to be combatted with the Individual. In metaphysics, therefore, Kierkegaard’s position comes to a focus in the doctrine of the Individual.

But the last role in which S. K. could bear to see himself cast is that of a professor. His work was not first and foremost a criticism of Hegelianism. Consistent with his position that Reality is not a System, he did not simply arrange a refutation of Hegel in paragraphs. Rather he would best like to be known as the Danish Socrates, a gadfly who pestered people and made life harder for them. He felt his mission to be an ethical one and faced himself with the task of calling attention to Christianity in Christendom. Here again, in the sphere of ethics, the category of the Individual is supreme. “With the category of ‘the individual’ is bound up any ethical importance I may...

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