Søren Kierkegaard vs Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Authenticity

Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both have a great deal to say about authenticity — 8 passages and 6 respectively in thinkr's library — and they do not say the same thing. Setting them side by side is more useful than reading either alone, because the disagreement shows you what each position is actually giving up.

Søren Kierkegaard on authenticity

Danish thinker often called the first existentialist. Explored anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith — what it costs to become a self before God.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”

“Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.”

“The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.”

“Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“If the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on authenticity

Genevan philosopher of feeling and the general will. His Social Contract and Emile reshaped politics and education in the Enlightenment.

“Let's go dance under the elms: / Step lively, young lassies. / Let's go dance under the elms: / Gallants, take up your pipes.”

“As a general rule—never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.”

“I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.”

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

“I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: Well, let them eat cake.”

“He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.”

Where they part

Denmark, 1813–1855 and Switzerland/France, 1712–1778 are not the same world, and the difference is not only historical. Søren Kierkegaard treats authenticity as something to be the most common form of despair… — a matter of practice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau approaches it from another side entirely. Neither is refuting the other; they are answering slightly different questions, and noticing which question you are actually asking is most of the work.