Authors: Søren Kierkegaard
These
Edifying Addresses
call for self-examination. They “unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.” They often explore a text and are never troubled if the same text has already been used in several previous addresses. They explore it slowly and deliberately. They look at each facet. Like a spider’s
web they throw out their main supporting filaments and then from the center outwards they weave around them strand by strand until the web is complete. They would leave no way of escape for one who enters. They would track down evasion into its hidden ways, they would expose every attempt to simulate, they would bring the reader into the very inmost demands of existence within the religious mode. They require patience on the part of the reader, but if he follows them through to their conclusion he can scarcely escape their grip upon his life.
Kierkegaard had a true and realistic respect for the resistance which a man’s mind offers to an idea, especially if it is an idea that demands costly action on his part. As a writer he knew how difficult it was to get his own thoughts embodied in suitable words. He suggests that if this is hard, it is ten times as hard to get these words of his to redistil their meaning into the thoughts and into the will of another. He was always ready, therefore, to take infinite pains with what he wrote, and the
Edifying Addresses
were all written over at least three times before they were finally published.
Eduard Geismar, the Danish scholar whose Kierkegaard studies have extended through a life-time, has written of
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing:
“It seems to me that nothing that he has written has sprung so directly out of his relationship with God as this address. Anyone who wishes to understand Kierkegaard properly will do well to begin with it.”
1
The fact that this address was written as a spiritual preparation for the office of confession does not limit its interest to those who observe church occasions. This office can be celebrated at any moment in the heart of one who is made ready.
Central in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard is his master
category
the individual.
All of his thought ultimately had to pass through the needle’s eye of whether or not it compelled men to face their sovereign responsibility as individuals. And this, too, was the pass of Thermopylæ at which Kierkegaard stationed himself to defend the individual against any philosophical, political, or religious teaching that tended to slack off this consciousness of the individual’s essential responsibility and integrity.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,
like his other
Edifying Addresses,
is directed in the preface to
hiin Enkelte,
“that solitary individual.” Yet in this address Kierkegaard succeeds with an exceptional directness in laying bare what it means to become an individual. The “indirect” method of insinuation which characterizes his approach to this problem in so many of his works is laid aside here. In one whole section with a relentless persistence he makes almost a choral refrain of the question, “Do you live as an individual?”
Kierkegaard apparently intended to attach a much longer preface to
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
than the one which appeared there. In this original preface he explained the dedication to
hiin Enkelte
“that solitary individual” and emphasized the importance of this category of
the individual
to his thought. This important preface which he later expanded somewhat, was followed by a second one on the same theme, written in
1847
and
1849,
and by a postscript added in
1855.
All three of these have been preserved and were attached as a supplement to the posthumously published
The Standpoint of My Activity as an Author
which appeared in
1859.
In these notes he wrote of the
Edifying Addresses:
“I marked my writings to which I attached my name with the category of
the individual
from the beginning; and it continued like a formula to be repeated in stereotyped fashion so that
the individual
is not a later invention of mine but has been there from the beginning.”
2
When Kierkegaard speaks of
hiin Enkelte
in his dedicatory preface, he means more than we do by our words “that individual.” The nearest English expression that approaches it is “that solitary individual.” He means the individual as separated from the rest, the individual as he would be if he were solitary and alone, face to face with his destiny, with his vocation, with the Eternal, with God Himself who had singled him out.
Perhaps Descartes was on the right road when he sought to isolate the individual I in man from all other experience and make it the starting point for his system. But he was wrong and even culpable in not pressing on in his exploration of the
I
beyond its capacity to think, for thought, Kierkegaard would insist, is not its most unique endowment. Here in the core of the
I
is a center from which choice springs, from which responsibility for one’s acts springs, from which the ultimate sense of uneasiness and weariness with anything that is short of the highest of all in reality ultimately issues, from which remorse and repentance arises.
Allow this center in a man to remain dulled by the crowd; allow it to continue dissipated by busyness; permit it to go on evading its function by a round of distractions, or to lull itself by a carefully chosen rotation of pleasures, abandon it to its attempt to drug, to narcotize suffering and remorse which might reveal to it its true condition; let it wither away the sense of its own validity by false theories of man’s nature, of his place in the social pattern, of his way of salvation; in short, allow any of these well-known forms of domestication of man’s responsible core as an individual, to continue unchallenged, and you as a
thinker and a friend of men have committed the supreme treason!
“In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy,” wrote Nietzsche, and in Kierkegaard the reader finds that he is confronted with a merciless enemy to every form of gregarious domestication within himself. Kierkegaard does not risk smothering his reader with leniency. He is prepared to be hard, to wound in order to heal, to use the knife. Kierkegaard conceived it his function as a writer to strip men of their disguises, to compel them to see evasions for what they are, to label blind alleys, to cut off men’s retreats, to tear down the niggardly roofs they continue to build over their precious sun-dials, to isolate men from the crowd, to enforce self-examination, and to bring them solitary and alone before the Eternal. Here he left them. For here that in man which makes him a responsible individual must itself act or it must take flight. No other can make this decision. Only when man is alone can he face the Eternal. And the act that is called for at this point is not one of mere noetic recognition. When all is known that can be known, the responsible core of the will in the man has still to yield. He must act, he must choose, he must risk, he must make the leap. For in an existence where qualitative differences remain, there is no other entry into the deepest level of existential living as an individual. Only by this leap on faith could one know the release of guilt, the sense of commitment, the acceptance of a vocation, of a calling in whose service is perfect freedom. For in any lesser service there is servility. Only the Omnipotent One dares exercise that restraint of true love that makes its associates free and heightens, not debases, the individual core of responsibility and integrity within them. “The consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is the one thing needful.”
Only in the light of this his central task can Kierkegaard’s attacks upon the philosophical speculation of Hegel or upon the social, political and ecclesiastical life of his day be understood. Hegel tended always to make the individual a mere passing-point, a moment, in the cosmic process, and to insist on the individual’s gaining his concrete ethical significance through being identified with the social, religious, and political institutions of his time. Man is to be saved by identification with a set of external arrangements. This for Kierkegaard is the ultimate blasphemy. For instead of heightening his core of responsibility and integrity man is invited to do what he is already enamored with doing, to join the crowd, the mass, to be dissolved into the organic whole. To become a set of relations within the whole is all too congenial to modern man, Kierkegaard believed. “It must be apparent to anyone with even a little dialectical skill, that one cannot attack the (Hegelian) system from within. Outside of it, however, there is only one free seminal point ‘the individual,’ ethically, religiously, and existentially accentuated.”
3
It was with this creative category of
the individual
that Kierkegaard attacked the Hegelian system.
All of these changes of outer arrangements, whether they be ecclesiastical, social, or political, seemed to Kierkegaard to gloss over the real problem—which was the awakening of
the individual.
Hence his profound disappointment in Luther’s having allowed himself to be lured eventually into a mere rebellion against the Pope, a casting off the yoke of the monastic system and of ascetic practices, instead of laying on men the even costlier responsibility of their vocation before God. The inward reformation was yet to come. Kierkegaard believed himself to be its prophet. Here, too, was rooted his disappointment and impatience
with the social revolutions of
1848
that believed by an upheaval of mass external arrangements to be able to resolve the basic problem of men. “In the future each effort at reformation, if its leader be a true reformer, will direct itself against the mass as such and not against the government,” he wrote in his
Journal
amid the rumblings of
1847.
Such an attempt as Tolstoy’s to find inwardness by becoming poor with the poor, or Lenin’s utopian endeavor to usher in a kind of social salvation by making all of the proletariat rich would only have met with Kierkegaard’s contempt. For they still rely on outer arrangements, they are still concerned primarily with “housekeeping,” and the deeper problem is left untouched.
The effort of Gruntvig and his school to whip up the national pride of Denmark by recalling it to the Nordic sagas and its glorious history, Kierkegaard felt to be so much public flattery and a violent poison to the real individual need of the soul. The comfortable Danish church in general he found to be blind to its compromises with bourgeois life which had reduced it to a low-pressure form of Christianity. This church stood out for him in sharpest contrast to the primitive Christian community.
All attempts at mass prescription, all things attainable in the mass as such, in fact the very notion of the crowd, of the mass, drew the most violent invective Kierkegaard had at his command. For he believed the crowd, the mass, to be a hiding-place in which the individual may abdicate his true quest for inward intensity and responsibility. The crowd is a sink of cowardice in which individuals are relieved of individual responsibility and will commit acts they would never dare to do alone. When a man is to be executed by shooting, not one executioner shoots, but several. When the noble Caius Marius was seized, no individual soldier dared touch him, but a crowd of them had no
such restraint. “Take the highest of all, think of Christ—and think of the whole human race, all that have been born and will be born. Now the situation is one where Christ is alone, so that someone as an individual alone with Christ stepped up to Him and spat upon Him: the man was never born and will never be born, who possesses the courage or the audacity to do this: that is the truth. As they became a crowd, however, they had the courage to do it—oh, terrible falsity.”
4
The mass flatters, the mass excuses, the mass condemns, the mass counts heads, the mass pronounces on truth, and in all these things the mass, for Kierkegaard, is that which is both false and debasing. To speak of
social salvation,
of salvation by group, by tribe, by race, by class, by nation, is for Kierkegaard an act of spiritual betrayal.
This isolation of man from the flock, from the mass, from the crowd and the heightening of his consciousness as an individual which the Eternal accomplishes is a central theme of
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
Before the quiet gaze of the Eternal, there is no hiding-place. As individuals we are what we are before God, and no mass opinion affects this in the least. Kierkegaard believed that his generation was seeking to live in mere time and to make the Eternal superfluous. He reminded them of the Eternal’s power to dissolve away time and to separate the crowd into individuals. In memory, in conscience, in remorse, in work at a calling, in the solitude, the Eternal still impinges upon the individual and awakens him to a consciousness both of himself and of his responsibility and of his worth to the Eternal.
In this polemic against the mass, the crowd, Kierkegaard could never be justly accused of parading a new snobbish aristocracy, a small upper-house of supermen. “The reader
will consider that here
the mass
is not … a
common herd.
God in heaven, what if the religious way should fall into such an inhuman division of mankind! No, the
mass
is a number, the numerical. A number of the nobility, the millionaires, the highest dignitaries, etc., can through the use of the numerical quite as readily become the
mass.”
5
“It is ‘the mass'—not this one or that one—that is now living, now dead, not a group of menials or of aristocrats, of rich or of poor, but the mass understood in a purely conceptual sense—which is the false. For as a man is in a crowd, he is released from repentance and responsibility or at least is weakened in responsibility for himself as an individual.”
6
Again in his
Journal
for
1847
he wrote, “I long to call the attention of the mass to its own doom.”