Individualism
Kierkegaard stresses the importance of passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth. Accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. Thus, the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer. Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for renewing Christian faith within Christendom. Throughout his works by various pen names, Kierkegaard has an underlying focus on the difference between the subjective and objective self. He states that the crowd (in reference to Christendom) being the untruth, has the most disregard for what it is to be a man than those people who see fit to pilot this flock of falsehood. It is no longer folly to be a Christian like it had been in the past, it is simply harder to distinguish the truth-seeking Christians from the simple, practical Christian. In Kierkegaard’s closing he looks at the present and future with jaded optimism, believing that maybe the objectively oriented Christian have replaced the truth-seeking Christian as the normal of the world. Kierkegaard looks at how it is a matter of course that the people of his time are Christians. By calling to the individual, he solicits the reader to participate in a Christian movement that he intends to motivate. He states, “Thus it is, as I believe, that I have rendered a service to the cause of Christianity… (Anthology, 336)”.