The singular individual: Stand-point of a renounced authorship

Abstract

S~bren Kierkegaard's authorship* traces a tortuous path between the hoary categories of traditional Christianity and the monumental system of Hegel's idealism to craft a single complete category: 1 the singular individual. As such, Kierkegaard's works stand as deeds, as concrete moments in the practice of individuality. His writings enact a repeated renunciation through which singular individuality comes to be lived, dissolving both the impact of Hegelianism and the religious illusion of Kierkegaard's contemporaries. Kierkegaard, more than Sartre, deserves to be called a scandalous author. More than Hegel, he deserves the title of systematic philosopher. Every public gesture with which the melancholic Dane appealed to artists and philosophers bore a Hegelian twist. In fact, Heget's philosophy became an essential property in Kierkegaard's religious scenario. Yet, Kierkegaard never became a Hegelian. He mimicked Hegel because that thinker had crafted the model of historical Christianism used by Kierkegaard's contemporaries to justify the givenness of their religious superiority vis-a-vis ancient religions and early Christianity. For t_he sake of Truth, ~ Kierkegaard assumed a disguise that enabled him to destroy the illusion of historical progress which had reduced religiosity to a philosophical thesis easily mouthed by indolent people. To shake his age out of that paralyzing religious tranquility, Kierkegaard became an author: a counter-Hegel disguised as a poet, a religious individual disguised as an historical Christian. His authorship was simply the copper bull inside which the singular individual slowly roasted so that his shrieks could sound as sweet music to the ears of an insensitive age (Either/Or, 1).3