“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review, 1846, Hong 1978/2009, pp. 67–68
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)
Context: It is not uncommon to hear a man who has become confused about what he should do in a particular situation complain about the unique nature of the situation, thinking that he could easily act if the situation were a great event with only one either/or. This is a mistake and a hallucination of the understanding. There is no such situation. The presence of the crucial either/or depends upon the individual’s own impassioned desire directed toward acting decisively, upon the individual’s own intrinsic competence, and therefore a competent man covets an either/or in every situation because he does not want anything more. But as soon as the individual no longer has essential enthusiasm in his passion but is spoiled by letting his understanding frustrate him every time he is going to act, he never in his life discovers the disjunction. And even if his penetrating, resourceful understanding is adequate for managing an entire household, he still has not had an understanding of his life in advance or in the moment of action, and it cannot be understood afterwords, either, because the action essentially did not take place, and the coherence of his life, became a garrulous continuation or a continued garrulity, a participial or infinitive phrase in which the subject must be understood or, more correctly, cannot be located at all because, as the grammarians say, the meaning does not make it clear for the simple reason that it lacks meaning. The whole thing becomes a flux, a blend of a little resolution and a little situation, a little prudence and a little courage, a little probability and a little faith, a little action and a little incident. Anyone who has made the fraudulent trade of getting abnormally good sense by losing the capacity to will and the passion to act is very inclined to stiffen his spinelessness with various and sundry predeliberations that feel their way ahead and various and sundry postmortem reinterpretations of what happened. Compared to this, an action is a brief something and apparently a poor something, yet it is in fact a definite something. The other is more splendid, but for all that it is a splendid shabbiness.

Aphorism 42
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 696, as cited in Social Cognitive Psychology: History and Current Domains (1997), David F. Barone, James E. Maddux, Charles R. Snyder . p. 20

Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925), p. 112

Revolution From Within

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 281, as cited in: Lenora Foerstel, Angela Gilliam (1994) Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. p. 84

Chap. 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation
Proposition 7.
The Evolution of Cooperation (1984; 2006)

Bestimmung des Menschen, p. 275
Hess' Diary

“Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 7
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews