Merold Westphal: Individual

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Merold Westphal: 28   quotes 0   likes

“In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; but in the present age it softens the spiritual requirements that are an essential ingredient in human dignity. Thus the slogans of equality serve not so much to elevate individuals to the dignity of being human as to free them from the responsibility of rising to this vocation.”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 49

Age , Passion

“It is the shared bad faith by which individuals help each other sustain the illusion that they can shirk their spiritual destiny by joining the public.”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 49

Faith , Help

“The question concerns the texture of daily life. Does the individual live with the assurance, conscious or unconscious, that We are absolute—or with the challenge of being, both as I and as We, finite and human?”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 38

Life , Question

“[For Hegel] it is the ethical task of the individual to transcend particularity and conform to the universal, to exhibit as a matter of character and behavior the values expressed in the laws and customs of his or her people. The problem is that the universal … is itself without moral obligations as soon as it has been absolutized. As divine, its will is law and its deeds are good.”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), pp. 39-40

People , Law , Behavior , Problem

“To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 35

God

“Kierkegaard seeks to un-socialize the individual in order to un-deify society.”

Merold Westphal

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 34