Can Societies Filled With Individualists Ever Work?

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The Danish, Christian Existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, famously said,

“Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone, I would ask for none other than ‘The Individual.’”

And the American, Christian Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else, is the greatest accomplishment.”

Both of these Christians were unique in that they felt that God was something to be found within them—apart from the Church and apart from group faith. Emerson found it in nature. Kierkegaard found it in a leap of faith (he coined the expression) & the confrontation of his own anxiety.

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Friedrich Nietzsche wasn’t a Christian at all—in fact, he infamously regarded the concept of God to be dead and no longer useful in the 19th century.

But he’s still lumped together in a category with Søren Kierkegaard, Russian Novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and many post-war, French Philosophers—like Jean-Paul Sartre—because despite having unique views of the world... what they all had in common was a belief that the answers we seek lay within us.

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