The Crowd is Untruth: a Comparison of Kierkegaard and Girard
by Charles K. Bellinger
The purpose of this essay is to provide an introductory comparison of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and René Girard. To my knowledge, a substantial secondary article or book has not been written on this subject.[1] Girard’s writings themselves contain only a handful of references to Kierkegaard.[2] This deficiency is unfortunate, since, as I hope to show in the following pages, these two authors do share common insights into the psychology of violence.
Girard’s writings usually take the form of a scientific analysis of historical data. He is attempting to frame a theory of culture which takes into account all of the data which he has encountered. It would seem that Kierkegaard’s mode of thought is very different, since he is primarily concerned with the meaning of personal existence before God. But Kierkegaard was in his own way and in his own time a kind of social scientist. He engaged in an extended “anthropological contemplation” (1967-1978, v. 1: #37), in which he attempted to map out the territory of the human spirit. Girard’s thought, for its part, occasionally steps outside of the methodological atheism of the scientific guild to speak in theological terms. Thus in both realms, the scientific and the theological, there is the possibility of fruitful dialogue between these two authors.
(Via Korrektiv)