The Value of Being Yourself

Accept my sincerest apologies if this post will have the sort of terminology which is quite unfamiliar and technical. Nevertheless, words are words! This is a reflection I wrote while in college based on the philosophical ideas of the Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard.  It is about individuality not individualism. It is about subjectivity not subjectivism and relativism. It is about being yourself and the faith that is demanded to do so. Kierkegaard calls it a leap of faith!

The journey to actualizing the potential for self-hood is possible only if the existing individual rises above the values, goals and altitudes of the common herd and strives to realize his identity as a unique particular:

“A crowd... (any crowd) in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impertinent and irresponsible or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”[1]

His aversion for objectivity and universality is vivid in these texts. With regard to our thesis, it becomes clear that Kierkegaard spares not his pen in battle against the totalizing force of the universal. “Subjectivity is the truth” is the maxim which guides the existential dialectic of Kierkegaard and liberates the individual from suffocating in a world of values that are meaningless to the subject. He rather advocates the freedom of the subject, the individual in making the existential choice for those truths which have subjective value.

The crowd-mentality assists all human kind to cheat by copying results and answers , subjective thinking on the other hand invests everything in the process of becoming , as every human being who has not let himself be tricked into being objective. As a matter of fact, it is absolutely easy to be like the others ,to become a copy, an imitation and a counterfeit, a mere number. In the crowd mentality, Kierkegaard affirms that;“The real crime, the one people regard as the worst of all and punish cruelly, is to be not like the others.”

Subjectivity exists truly only in the leap of faith, in the blind leap into a zone of objective uncertainty, into the unknown. Life is not about objectivity, it’s not about universality, it’s not about unchanging principles. It’s not about being like everyone else. It’s not about being like the rest of the crowd. “the crowd is untruth” Rather, it’s about relating with the singular individual in the most fluid way, in the most unscripted way.

 The good life is not legitimized by any political, moral, religious or metaphysical system. indeed, it’s the very opposite of systems. Morality is about directly responding to the human being who stands before me; beyond ideology, beyond dogma, beyond creed. It is about relating beyond and above any categorical system beyond conceptualizing. It is about looking and seeing. It is beyond theory, beyond abstraction. This is the fundamental thesis in Kierkegaard’s works.

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[1] Kiekergaard, The Point of View,(Lowrie W (trans), London, p39

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