The Kierkegaarden

“A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by the deceptive juggling of an age of refelection, which makes it appear flattering to the individual, who in this way can arrogate to himself this monster in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor.” ———————————— ~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846) Author: Soren Kierkegaard

“There is no good calling upon a Holder Danske or a Martin Luther; their day is over, and at bottom it is only the individual’s laziness which makes a man long to have them back, a worldly impatience which prefers to buy something cheap, second-hand, rather than to buy the highest of all things very dear and first-hand. It is worse than useless to found society after society, because negatively speaking there is something above them, even though the short-sighted member of the society cannot see it.”
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~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by the deceptive juggling of an age of refelection, which makes it appear flattering to the individual, who in this way can arrogate to himself this monster in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor.” ———————————— ~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846) Author: Soren Kierkegaard

“The principle of individuality in its immediate and beautiful formation symbolizes the generation in the outstanding and eminent individual; it groups subordinate individualities around the representative. This principle of individuality, in its eternal truth, uses the abstraction and equality of the generation to level down, and in that way co-operates in developing the individual religiously into a real man. For the leveling process is as powerful where temporary things are concerned as it is impotent where eternal things are concerned.”
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~Source: Two Ages: “The Present Age: A Literary Review” (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“The principle of individuality in its immediate and beautiful formation symbolizes the generation in the outstanding and eminent individual; it groups subordinate individualities around the representative. This principle of individuality, in its eternal truth, uses the abstraction and equality of the generation to level down, and in that way co-operates in developing the individual religiously into a real man. For the leveling process is as powerful where temporary things are concerned as it is impotent where eternal things are concerned.”
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~Source: Two Ages: “The Present Age: A Literary Review” (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“A generation, a people, an assembly of the people, a meeting, or a man are responsible for what they are and can be made ashamed if they are inconstant and unfaithful; but a public remains a public. A people, an assembly or a man can change to such an extent that one may say: they are no longer the same; a public on the other hand can become the very opposite and still be the same — a public.” —————— ~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846) Author: Soren Kierkegaard

“The leveling process is not the action of an individual, but the work of reflection in the hands of an abstract power. It is therefore possible to calculate the law governing it in the same way that one calculates the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces…A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power, and though the very abstraction of leveling gives the individual a momentary, selfish kind of enjoyment, he is at the same time signing the warrant for his own doom. Enthusiasm *may* end in disaster, but leveling is *eo ipso* the destruction of the individual. No age, and therefore not the present age, can bring the skepticism of that process to a stop, for as soon as it tries to stop it, the law of the leveling process is again called into action. It can therefore only be stopped by the individual’s attaining the religious courage which springs from his individual religious isolation.”
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~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard