Laudator Temporis Acti

Here is a caricature of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) by Danish cartoonist Peter Klaestrup, published in the satirical paper The Corsair:


It reminds me a bit of a pencil sketch of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) by his friend Daniel Ricketson:


The existentialist and the transcendentalist are both standing, both facing left, both wearing hats, and both holding umbrellas.

Another similarity between Thoreau and Kierkegaard? Their views on the importance of the individual and the insignificance of the crowd. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 183, quotes from a letter of Thoreau to Emerson:

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

Compare these passages from Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, tr. R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1968):

XI¹ A 384 (p. 141):

These millions, the law of whose existence is 'first be like the rest', this mass of aping -- materially they look as if they were something, something great, something immensely powerful. And materially they are indeed something; but ideally this mass, these millions are zero, they are less than zero, they are wasted and forfeited existences.

XI² A 90 (pp. 230-231):

One hundred thousand million men, of which each is like the rest = one. Only when one turns up who is different from these millions or this one, do we have two.

Something to keep in mind, when we see newsreels of thousands of savages rioting, gesticulating, and screeching over a few harmless cartoons in a Danish newspaper -- "Materially they look as if they were something, something great, something immensely powerful. And materially they are indeed something; but ideally this mass, these millions are zero, they are less than zero, they are wasted and forfeited existences."