Volume 15, Tome II: Kierkegaard's Concepts

Classicism to Enthusiasm

Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032099002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351875028
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Crowd/Public

Leo Stan

The Crowd (Mængde, Masse, Opløb, Hob, Vrimlen—nouns); the Public (Publikum—noun)

Few are the themes that Kierkegaard has been unabashedly consistent about throughout his entire oeuvre. The passionate rebuttal of the crowd in all of its embodiments, including the public, is by far the most cogent. From the first volume of Either/Or¹ to the very last journalistic piece in 1855,² Kierkegaard proved tireless in acerbically attacking the collective in all its forms. His anti-collectivist assaults are to some degree contextual insofar as they envisage the modern advent of the mass man onto the scene of history. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s unambiguous rejection has more profound roots, which emanate from the soteriological crux of Christian spirituality. In other words, the monstrosity of crowds is not a specifically modern phenomenon; the collective monster is at work from the dawn of Christianity as one can see in the brutal end of Jesus Christ.³ That is why Kierkegaard’s pugnacious individualism cannot be separated from the theological—that is, creationistic, salvific, and personalist—foundation and postulates of his thought.

Kierkegaard’s ruthless verdicts on both the mob and the public have an unmistakable genealogical nature. His main interest concerns the reasons why and the ways in which crowds come into being, what exactly motivates the individual to join others in vast swarms from the beginning of Christian recorded history until modern times. In what follows, this peculiar genealogy will be pursued thematically rather than chronologically. Also, it should be mentioned that Kierkegaard’s reflections on these issues, albeit scattered throughout his entire corpus, are most prominent in the second half of his activity—especially, after the publication of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript—and mainly in the signed authorship.

To start with, the least harmful reason why people congregate in undifferentiated masses is mere foolishness or light-mindedness.⁴ Secondly, Kierkegaard argues, the mob mentality can arise from intersubjective, though existentially void, comparisons, which are the best way to avoid or procrastinate over encountering the divine face-to-face.⁵ This attitude is very tempting because mobs are based on arbitrary similarities, whereby the individual takes refuge in likeness with others,⁶ instead of acting on his or her transcendently grounded distinctiveness from them.

The next feature is abstraction, which follows directly from the lack of differentiation among individuals in a mob. Kierkegaard observes first that crowds emerge because some believe certain ideals or goals can be attained only in a collective, visible setting.⁷ In this way, one acquires an unmistakable pride given by merely being part of a multitude and enjoys the perverse pleasure of having become a mere number.⁸ The faceless, collectivistic crux of any mob whatsoever can be glimpsed particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century when, according to Kierkegaard, we witness a true dictatorship of multitudes that stifles any personal authenticity, be it religious or not.⁹ The modern mob seems fatally attracted to the “mathematical equality,”¹⁰ whereby a large gathering is mystically unified into one self, as it were. In essence, however, masses are predicated on a deceptive personal identity in lieu of the singularity attained before the one and only God.¹¹ A similar drive towards the concocted and the unreal is confirmed by the crowd’s irresistible attraction to incontrovertible certainties, lofty speculations, and putatively objective statements.¹² The major consequence of all this is the drastic impairment of the individual’s effort to fulfill one’s religious duties and reach salvation.¹³ That happens also because first there exists a profound affinity between existential untruth, on the one hand, and the abstract and the numerical, on the other;¹⁴ and second because the redemptive truth relates itself only to the living, irrevocable singularity of every person.¹⁵

The two attributes that follow from the crowd’s abstraction are amorphousness and anonymity. Concerning the former, Kierkegaard simply states that the mob is determined by a characterless homogeneity,¹⁶ which induces in all its members an ethical or existential somnambulism. More exactly, neither the mob nor the individuals within it have any clear, definite knowledge of their identity or their intentions and the means to achieve them.¹⁷ What governs the crowd is a fundamental agitated confusion that, incidentally, makes possible its endless manipulability.¹⁸

As regards anonymity, Kierkegaard derives it from the individual’s inclination towards self-oblivion. Thus, while surrounded “by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Classicism
• Comic/Comedy
• Common Man
• Communication/Indirect Communication
• Communion
• Concept
• Concrete/Abstract
• Confession
• Conscience
• Consciousness
• Contemporaneity
• Contingency/Possibility
• Contradiction
• Corrective
• Courage
• Creation
• Crisis
• Crowd/Public
• Culture/Education
• Dance
• Death
• Decision/Resolve
• Defiance
• Demonic
• Desire
• Despair
• Dialectic
• Dialogue
• Dogma/Doctrine
• Double Movement
• Double Reflection
• Dreams
• Duty
• Dying To/Renunciation
• Earnestness
• Edifying Discourse/Deliberation/Sermon
• Enthusiasm