Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard enters Individua not as a system-builder but as the one who exposes the cost of becoming a self. He is the critic who refuses to let the individual hide behind abstractions, crowds, or inherited certainties. His entire authorship is a sustained confrontation with the question: will you become the one who chooses yourself, or will you dissolve into the undifferentiated mass of others’ expectations?
He gives Individua its existential grammar. Where other thinkers offer structures, Kierkegaard offers the inward movement that makes any structure meaningful. He insists that individuality is not a property but a task, a continual act of relating oneself to oneself, and through that relation, grounding oneself. This is the point where the will and the ego must be distinguished with absolute clarity: the ego clings to roles, narratives, and social mirrors; the will stands before freedom, anxious and exposed, yet capable of choosing itself without guarantees.
For Kierkegaard, inwardness is not introspection. It is the lived depth where one confronts the truth that cannot be outsourced. Individua draws directly from this: the individual is not a finished entity but a dynamic relation that must continually be appropriated. The self is a verb. A movement. A responsibility.
This is why despair matters. In The Sickness Unto Death, despair is not an emotion but a structural misrelation within the self. It is the refusal to be what one is called to become. Individua uses this insight to frame the internal fractures that occur when the ego attempts to substitute external validation for inward grounding. Despair becomes diagnostic: it reveals where the relation has collapsed.
Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety is foundational for Individua’s treatment of freedom. Anxiety is not pathology; it is the vertigo that arises when the individual recognizes the open horizon of possibility. It is the moment where the will senses its own power. Individua treats this not as something to be eliminated but as a signal that one stands at the threshold of authorship.
Kierkegaard’s leap is often misunderstood as irrational. In Individua, it is the decisive act where the will commits itself without external guarantees. It is the refusal to wait for certainty before acting. The leap is the moment the individual becomes the ground of their own becoming. It is the existential analogue to Individua’s emphasis on self-authorship: no system, no doctrine, no crowd can perform the leap on your behalf.
Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truth is not relativism. It is the insistence that truth must be lived. A proposition may be correct, but unless it is inwardly appropriated, it remains inert. Individua uses this to anchor its distinction between conceptual understanding and existential integration. Knowledge that is not lived is noise. Knowledge that is appropriated becomes structure.
Kierkegaard’s short, devastating text The Crowd is Untruth provides the ethical warning that runs through Individua: the crowd dissolves responsibility. It offers comfort at the price of selfhood. Individua adopts this stance not as misanthropy but as a structural insight. The individual must resist the gravitational pull of the crowd to maintain the integrity of their own inward relation.
Representative Works
- The Sickness Unto Death
- Fear and Trembling
- Either/Or
- The Concept of Anxiety
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript
- The Crowd is Untruth
On Kierkegaardian Pseudonyms
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are not disguises. Each represents a distinct existential position, a voice that embodies a particular mode of life. He uses them to prevent passive reading. The reader must choose, interpret, and appropriate. Individua mirrors this technique by presenting perspectives that require active engagement rather than passive consumption.