From ON MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR (1851)

On the goodness of the single individual.

“I certainly do have faith in the rightness of my thought…but next to that the last thing I would surrender is my faith in individual human beings. And this is my faith, that however much confusion and evil and contemptibleness there can be in human beings as soon as they become the irresponsible and unrepentant ‘public’, ‘crowd’, etc.—there is just as much truth and goodness and lovableness in them when one can get them as single individuals.”

As Kierkegaard’s literary career unfolded, he became more and more intent on providing an account of his authorship. In one 1851 journal entry, he observes that his utilization of various pseudonyms and communicative strategies could “create a very chaotic impression,” unless a unifying authorial perspective were put forward. He attempted to develop such a perspective on a number of occasions, though only the short On My Work as an Author was published in his lifetime. The passage cited above follows Kierkegaard’s claim that his writings, taken as a whole, were meant “to shake off ‘the crowd’ in order to get hold of ‘the single individual’, religiously understood.” Much could be (and has been) said about Kierkegaard’s conception of the individual, though, intriguingly, it is not often stressed that Kierkegaard’s so-called “individualism” was bound up with a fundamental love and trust of human beings as individuals. For Kierkegaard, it seems, the human susceptibility to sin is deepened and exacerbated by social dynamics, particularly those that seek to establish factions and partisanship.