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.
