What the Left Can Learn From Søren Kierkegaard

“I believe the Left has a great deal that it can learn from these arguments. For too long we have left problems of meaning to the Right, while largely focusing on issues of material equality and political participation.”

Introduction

“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”

On the one hand, it might seem highly unusual to write a piece about what the Left can learn from a thinker like Søren Kierkegaard. The so-called “melancholy” Dane wrote relatively little about politics directly and often seemed to consider it a relatively superficial phenomenon. Moreover, to the extent he was political, Kierkegaard was highly critical of the liberalization of Danish society and the national Church, especially. He felt that the greater social and political freedoms people now enjoyed had the potential to turn people away from higher pursuits and towards the crude lusting for pleasure and mean satisfaction.

As he artfully put it, “People demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought they seldom use.” Kierkegaard himself would get a taste of this when he got caught in the midst of a vicious cycle of scandal and gossip with the liberal Corsair magazine. In 1845, in response to a lukewarm article about his work, Kierkegaard had dared the Corsair to satirize him, and the magazine duly obliged. It became difficult for the legendarily intense and proud man to even step outside without facing mockery. This instilled in Kierkegaard a distrust of the press and mass society, which would culminate in works like The Present Age in which he mocked liberal mass society and its alleged freedoms. Finally, Kierkegaard was a Christian thinker who wrote voluminously on the topic of the Church and faith. This puts him at odds with much of current left-wing thinking, which tends to be staunchly secular.