Soren Kierkegaard

upbringing .The individual is not to be represented by other and superior
authorities but is to represent himself—which is to say,be himself—and this
must take place without the safety net that various institutions had pre-
viously extended beneath the individual: “Leveling itself became the strict
taskmaster who takes charge of upbringing .And the person who learns the
most from this upbringing and becomes the most he can be, does not be-
come the remarkable one, the hero, the extraordinary—this is prevented
by leveling... .No, he only becomes an essentially human being in the full
sense of equality .This is the idea of the religious .” Thus leveling confronts
the individual with a radical choice:eitherto be lost in the “dizziness of
abstract infinity”orto be saved “infinitely in the essentiality of the reli-
gious.” Andto this extentthe developments of modern times signal a kind
of progress, namely, that the “individuals who are saved acquire the specific
gravity of the religious, acquire its essentiality firsthand from God.”
At the same time, however, Kierkegaard’s paradoxical hope, the notion
of a sort of democratized religiosity, presupposes that a difference will have
to be introduced into the undifferentiated .Someone must make the age
aware of its condition, and this can only be done by showing it something
utterly different from itself .And this is the sort of difference that is devel-
oped in the latter part ofA Literary Review, where Kierkegaard, bordering
on the cryptic, writes: “Only by means of asufferingaction would the unrec-
ognizable one dare to help leveling in its progress, and with this same suffer-
ing action he will pass judgment on the instrument used .He does not dare
to defeat leveling straightforwardly .That would be the end of him, because
it would be acting with authority .But he will defeat it in suffering and will
thereby express once again the law of his existence, which is not to com-
mand, govern, or lead, but to serve in suffering, to help indirectly.”
What, we might ask, is such a “sufferingaction”? And how can anything
as contradictory as a “sufferingaction” promote leveling while at the same
time passing judgment on it? This is not immediately obvious, but it gradu-
ally emerges that the “sufferingaction” is Kierkegaard’s more or less meta-
phorical paraphrase of martyrdom! Thus deep within the text a subtle sym-
metry reveals itself: To the passionate age corresponds the hero, to the
passionless age corresponds the antihero, the martyr .And while the hero
distinguishes himself with his will to power, the martyr is distinguished by
hiswill to powerlessness—though it should be noted thatas a willthis will to
powerlessness is no less heroic than that of the hero .Therefore such a will
can also contain what Kierkegaard called “the power for a catastrophe,”
that is, the catastrophe it would be for society’s self-understanding if a martyr
were suddenly to stand in the midst of society.