Søren Kierkegaard vs Ralph Waldo Emerson on Authenticity

Søren Kierkegaard and Ralph Waldo Emerson both have a great deal to say about authenticity — 8 passages and 15 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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson on authenticity

American essayist and central voice of Transcendentalism. His essays — Self-Reliance, Nature — call the individual back to direct experience and inner authority.

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

“I fancy I need more than another to speak (rather than write), with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders.”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

“Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.”

“Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.”

“The cup of life is not so shallow That we have drained the best That all the wine at once we swallow And lees make all the rest.”

“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

“No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.”

“We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

“Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.”

“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.”

“The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.”

“You can take better care of your secret than another can.”

“Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.”

Where they part

Denmark, 1813–1855 and USA, 1803–1882 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson 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.