THE SINGULAR INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN KIERKEGAARD

Abstract

Kierkegaard is the thinker par excellence of the singular individual. This category is central to his thought and the thread running through his writings. For Kierkegaard, to be a singular individual is not the privilege of a few, but a universal possibility. One's existential task consists in becoming a singular individual. Kierkegaard uses this category to examine critically the deep social changes that take place with the development of science, industrialization and the advent of the mass media, with the emergence of the mass society and its inherent tendency to depersonalization. Kierkegaard is often criticized for ad­vocating a radical individualism that devalues the social dimension of human existence. While there are passages in Kierkegaard's writings which justify the critique of excessive individualism, the conception of the singular individual before God should be viewed as a corrective to the distorted forms of sociality present in the modern mass societies and not so much as a devaluation of the social dimension of human existence.