Kierkegaard at the Intersections: The Single Individual and Identity Politics

J Aaron Simmons

doi:10.3390/rel12070547

Abstract

Kierkegaard’s authorship is frequently charged with being so radically individualistic that his work is of little use to social theory. However, in this essay, I argue that Kierkegaard’s notion of “the single individual” actually offers important critical resources for some aspects of contemporary identity politics. Through a focused consideration of the two notes that form the little essay, “The Individual” (published with Point of View), I suggest that Kierkegaard does not ignore embodied historical existence, as is sometimes claimed, but instead simply rejects the idea that one’s moral dignity is determined by, or reducible to, such embodied differentiation. Instead, what we find in Kierkegaard is a rejection of the quantitative judgment of “the crowd” in favor of the qualitative neighbor-love of community. In light of Kierkegaard’s claim that it is the specifically religious category of the single individual that makes possible true human equality, I contend that we can develop a Kierkegaardian identity theory consistent with some aspects of the standpoint and intersectionality theory of Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Although Collins and Crenshaw operate at a structural level and Kierkegaard works at a theological level, they all offer important reminders to each other about the stakes of lives of meaning in light of the embodied task of social justice.

Highlights

In full recognition of the passages in his work that do stress the distance of his thought from political life, and acknowledging the robust scholarship that has tried to apply his work to political existence,1 I think that there has generally been a missed opportunity to see the notion of “the single individual” as potentially compatible with some aspects of contemporary identity politics
I will suggest that such a Kierkegaardian account resonates in important ways with standpoint and intersectionality theory that emerges in light of the work of scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw
Collins and Crenshaw will understand individual identity as a structural reality and Kierkegaard will understand it as a religious reality, they are all invested in the idea that, in the name of human equality, selfhood is irreducible to the workings of power that threaten to turn us into anonymous members of some quantitative calculus resulting from an abstract unity: the species, the public, the they, the crowd, etc

Summary

Barnett

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. I was conscious of being a religious author and as such was concerned with “the individual” (“the individual”—in contrast to “the public”), a thought in which is contained an entire philosophy of life and of the world Marking such a rigid distinction between the single individual and the public, Kierkegaard certainly does not make it easy for readers who would like to find clear guidance on public life and social justice. For example, the opening to his essay, “The Individual”, which was published with Point of View, and consists of a preface, two “notes” written in the period 1846–1847, and a postscript on those two notes written in March of 1855 In the preface, he writes, “In these times politics is everything” Despite Kierkegaard’s rhetorical rejection of the political sphere as being of any concern to his thought, a lot depends on what he means by “political”—and it is important not to push Kierkegaard too far into a position that we might wish he had occupied. When Kierkegaard is critical of politics, he does not dismiss lived, and embodied, historical human existence, but a particular authority from which such existence is understood to receive its significance: the crowd

From Crowd to Community

Two Critical Objections

Identity Blindness Objection

Alliances as Self-Love Objection

The Samaritan Woman: A Biblical Case Study

Conclusions