The Weight of a Decision: Kierkegaard on Choice and Responsibility

The Weight of a Decision: Kierkegaard on Choice and Responsibility

You made a decision and it turned out wrong. Now two roads lie before you: defend it to the end, or face it. Kierkegaard named the second; Marx showed where that reckoning is completed.

In February 1843 a strange two-volume book appeared in Copenhagen under the name Victor Eremita. The first volume was the scattered notes of a young aesthete known only as "A". In one of those notes he wrote: "Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it; marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way." The second volume consisted of long letters written to that young man by an older judge, Wilhelm. The judge told him this: what matters is not so much choosing the right thing as choosing to choose — and shouldering the weight of what you have chosen. The book was called "Enten — Eller": Either/Or. Its author was a twenty-nine-year-old theology graduate who hid behind pseudonyms and had broken off his engagement in the autumn of 1841: Søren Kierkegaard.

Dear Young Comrades,

This piece grew out of a conversation in our philosophy circle, the Marmaris Philosophy Community (MARFET). Two sentences shared there touched on a subject that is both very apt and easily misunderstood, and we wanted to shed a little more light on it. As with our pieces on Nietzsche and Fromm, this is the continuation on the blog of a discussion opened at MARFET. These were the two sentences; the whole piece is an unfolding of them:

For Kierkegaard, owning your choices does not mean defending a wrong decision at any cost. What really matters is being able to face your own choice, your responsibilities and the consequences of your choices.

This perspective leads us not only to ask "Did I make the right decision?" but towards the question "Can I take responsibility for the decision I made?"

At first glance this looks like advice that could be printed on the back cover of a self-help book. It is not. The difference between these two questions is the difference that decides how a person relates to themselves, how an organisation relates to its own history and how a class relates to its own defeats. In everyday life and in politics, on a union's executive board and in front of a software team's crashed server, we meet the same distinction: will we be the ones who defend the mistake, or the ones who own it?

Let us state the thesis of this piece at the outset:

Kierkegaard showed that responsibility is not "having the right outcome" but "standing by your own choice"; this is a lasting contribution to the history of philosophy. But he shut that ownership up inside the inner world of the single individual, in their solitude before God. The Marxist tradition carries this reckoning from the inside out, from conscience to practice, from the individual to the organisation: responsibility means analysing the conditions of the mistake and changing those conditions together. To read Kierkegaard is to be able to take these two steps together.

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First, a summary

For the reader in a hurry, here is the whole piece in eight points; details and sources follow below.

1. To choose is to build a self. In Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), Judge Wilhelm answers the "aesthete" who chooses nothing in order to keep every door open: the person who does not choose does not have a self.
2. Earnestness is needed not to protect a decision but to test it. According to Wilhelm, the person who chooses in earnest will, if they chose wrongly, discover it. Ownership is the precondition for seeing the error, not a means of covering it up.
3. We defend wrong decisions to escape anxiety. "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." Reopening a decision reopens the anxiety. Festinger's research on cognitive dissonance and the sunk cost fallacy measure this flight.
4. Defending and owning are different things. The one who defends asks, "Was I right?" The one who owns asks, "Can I face the consequences?" Tearing yourself to pieces is also a flight; responsibility is neither denial nor self-flagellation, it is accountability.
5. Ownership cut off from accountability is dangerous. The idea of the "suspension of the ethical" in Fear and Trembling became one of the sources of a line that runs all the way to Carl Schmitt's decisionism. Standing behind a decision can be done alone; being accountable requires a community.
6. Kierkegaard shut responsibility up in the inner world. What the critiques of Lukács, Adorno and Sartre have in common is this: responsibility begins in conscience but cannot be completed there. In Marx's words, people choose, but they choose under conditions they did not choose.
7. Responsibility is completed in the organisation. Its counterpart in the organisation is self-criticism; in Lenin's formulation, openly acknowledging the mistake, analysing its conditions and discussing the way to correct it. Its counterpart in the workplace is the blameless review. The discourse of "personal responsibility", meanwhile, is a class instrument that keeps authority at the top and the cost at the bottom.
8. Choosing the struggle knowingly and willingly is the highest form of responsibility. Comrades who have set out to transform life take the road for a world worthy of human beings knowing the cost from the start, and they carry that cost themselves. Dialectical materialism does not see this choice as a leap into the void; it sees it as the comprehension of necessity, that is, as freedom. This choice extends from a single person "choosing themselves" to choosing their class. The cost is not glorified, nor is it paid in vain; the organisation carries the responsibility of the comrade who pays it.

In a single sentence: Own your choice, but do not defend it like a fortress; walk it like a road. If it turns out wrong, correct the course and do not do it alone.

Now to the details. In turn we take up who Kierkegaard was, the concept of choice in Either/Or, anxiety and why we defend our wrong decisions, the difference between defending and owning, the meaning of repentance, the dark side of this thought, the Marxist critique and the passage from the individual to the organisation. Then we discuss the responsibility of those who choose the struggle knowingly, and a dialectical materialist vision. At the very end there are concrete tasks.

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A solitary in Copenhagen: 1813–1855

Kierkegaard's life is a short one, uneventful on the surface but stormy within. Before reading him you need to know a few dates, because this philosopher's whole body of work revolves around a few great decisions in his own life.

1813. Born on 5 May in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, had started out as a shepherd boy in a poor village in Jutland and grown rich in Copenhagen trading in wool and hosiery; he was a harshly devout man. This fortune made it possible for Søren to spend his whole life writing without ever working in a paid job. Keep this detail in mind; we will come back to it when we reach the Marxist critique.

1840–1841. He became engaged to Regine Olsen; a year later he sent back the ring. He never said clearly why. Regine married someone else; Kierkegaard wrote around this decision for the rest of his life. The pages on marriage in Either/Or, the problem of sacrifice in Fear and Trembling and the whole construction of Repetition feed on this wound. In other words, this man who wrote about choice and responsibility built his theory in the shadow of his own heaviest decision.

1841–1842. Right after defending his doctoral thesis (On the Concept of Irony), he went to Berlin and attended Schelling's famous lectures. Two other young men were sitting in the same hall, at the same lectures: Mikhail Bakunin and Friedrich Engels. Engels drew from those lectures the critical pamphlet Schelling and Revelation; Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen disappointed. Two roads of post-Hegelian European thought — one leading into the inner world of the single individual, the other into social practice — came out of the same hall.

1843–1846. An extraordinary period of productivity. Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Repetition (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Stages on Life's Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846). Most of the books were published under pseudonyms. This matters: with each pseudonym Kierkegaard lets a different "view of life" speak from the inside; what Judge Wilhelm says is not Kierkegaard's last word, it is a stage.

1846. His polemic with the satirical magazine of the day, The Corsair, made him a laughing stock on the streets of Copenhagen. In his review Two Ages, written the same year, he sharply criticised "the public", the press and "levelling" (nivellering).

1849. The Sickness unto Death. His densest book, in which he defines the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself".

1854–1855. He launched an open war on the Danish state church; in his self-published pamphlets The Moment (Øjeblikket), he accused the church and its priests, salaried by the state, of turning Christianity into a civil service.

1855. At the beginning of October he collapsed in the street; on 11 November he died in Frederik's Hospital, aged forty-two. The fortune he had inherited from his father was almost exhausted.

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Either/Or: choosing to choose

The young aesthete "A" of the book's first volume represents the aesthetic view of life. The aesthetic person lives in the moment; seeks pleasure, the interesting, novelty; flees boredom. Most importantly: they choose nothing definitively. To choose is to close doors; the aesthete wants to keep all doors open. The line "Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it" is the essence of this attitude: since every choice will end in regret, not choosing is the wisest course.

In the second volume Judge Wilhelm answers with the ethical view of life. For Wilhelm, the aesthete's problem is not that he chooses the wrong things, but that he does not choose at all. The person who does not choose does not have a self; they remain a series of moments blown about by the wind of circumstances, moods and opportunities. The opposition Wilhelm sets up comes before choosing between good and evil: the real "either/or" is whether you will let the distinction between good and evil into your life at all, that is, whether you will choose to choose.

And then comes the passage that intersects directly with the subject of this piece. Wilhelm says, roughly:

"What is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right as the energy, the earnestness and the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby the personality is consolidated. Therefore, even if a person chose the wrong thing, by virtue of the energy with which they chose, they will discover that they chose the wrong thing."

This passage can be read in two ways, and the difference between the two readings is the whole point of this piece.

The first reading — the dangerous one: "What matters is not to choose rightly but to choose passionately." In this reading responsibility is reduced to determination. What you choose does not matter; as long as you stand behind it, you are right. This can become the philosophical cover for stubbornness, for the arrogance of "I gave my word once", for defending a wrong decision at any cost.

The second reading — what Wilhelm actually says: Look at the passage's last sentence. The person who chooses in earnest, if they chose wrongly, will discover it. That is, earnestness is needed not to protect the decision but to test it. When a decision made half-heartedly, evasively, with the thought "I can always go back" turns out wrong, the person does not even notice; because they never truly gave themselves to it. A decision made in earnest, by contrast, brings the person face to face with its outcome. Ownership is the precondition for seeing the error, not a means of covering it up.

The famous sentence Kierkegaard wrote in his own journals completes this second reading:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

At the moment of decision we never have complete information. Whether a decision was right we understand only afterwards, looking back. So the only honest question that can be asked at the moment of decision is not "Am I deciding rightly?" but "Am I ready to face the consequences of this decision — whatever they turn out to be?"

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Anxiety: why do we defend our wrong decisions?

Why is defending a wrong decision a stance people resort to so often? Kierkegaard's answer to this question is called anxiety.

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) comes this famous sentence:

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

A person standing at the edge of a cliff feels dizzy. This dizziness comes not only from the fear of falling but from the awareness that one could jump. Freedom is like this too: to be able to choose is to be able to choose wrongly. Anxiety is the echo of this possibility within us.

Because anxiety is unbearable, people flee it. Defending a wrong decision is one of the most common forms of this flight. Reopening the decision means reopening the anxiety: "What if I have been wrong all along? What if all this effort, all this time, has been wasted? What if I am not who I thought I was?" The easiest way to flee these questions is to defend the decision like a fortress.

What Kierkegaard sensed a century earlier, twentieth-century social psychology measured. In 1954 Leon Festinger and his colleagues infiltrated a small group that believed the world would end in a flood on 21 December. The date came; the flood did not. The expectation was that the group would break up. What happened was the opposite: after the prophecy collapsed, some of the members clung to their beliefs more tightly, went before the public they had avoided until that day and began to proselytise fervently for the first time. Festinger published this study as When Prophecy Fails (1956) and from it developed the theory of cognitive dissonance: to relieve the discomfort created by a conflict between their actions and their beliefs, people often change not their action but the way they interpret reality.

What economists call the sunk cost fallacy is the everyday form of the same mechanism: the more we have invested in something, the harder it becomes to admit that it was wrong. Unfinished construction projects, unsalvageable projects, wars kept going — in all of them the same sentence is heard: "Should all this effort go to waste?"

But note: this is a psychological explanation, not the whole of the explanation. Who can take back a decision, under what conditions and at what cost is also a class question. We will come back to this when we reach the Marxist critique and the question of organisation.

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The difference between defending and owning

Now let us put the two sentences at the beginning of the piece into a table. In the left column, the attitude of the person who defends their decision; in the right column, the attitude of the person who takes responsibility for it:

Defending the decision at any cost	Taking responsibility for the decision
The real question: "Was I right?"	The real question: "Can I face the consequences?"
Treats the decision as part of the self; takes criticism of the decision as criticism of themselves	Sees the self in the capacity to re-evaluate its decisions
New information is an attack to be fended off	New information is an opportunity to test the decision
Belittles the consequences, changes their interpretation ("it isn't really like that")	Names the consequences, measures them, accepts them
Blames circumstances or others — or, quite the opposite, takes all the blame and punishes themselves	Analyses their own share and the share of the conditions separately
Treats consistency as a virtue ("I said it once")	Treats honesty as a virtue ("that is what I knew that day; today I know something else")
Experiences turning back as defeat	Sees correcting the course as part of the decision
Flees anxiety	Carries anxiety
Result: the mistake grows, is covered up, is repeated	Result: the mistake teaches

Pay particular attention to the fifth row of the table. Stubbornness is not the only way of defending a wrong decision; it also has a reverse side: tearing yourself to pieces, beating your breast and saying "it is all my fault". This too is a flight. The person who blames themselves wholesale does not take the trouble to analyse the concrete causes of the mistake; self-flagellation takes the place of correction. Taking responsibility, by contrast, is neither denial nor self-punishment; it is accountability — first to yourself, then to others.

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Repentance: shouldering the past

Judge Wilhelm knows that what he calls "choosing oneself" is no easy thing. The person who chooses themselves chooses not only their present but their past too: their mistakes, their shortcomings, the family they come from, the history they have lived. In Wilhelm's language, a person chooses themselves in repentance; through repentance they return to themselves, to their family, to their lineage.

This differs from the everyday sense of regret. In everyday usage, regret means looking back and lamenting, "If only I hadn't." Repentance in Kierkegaard (Danish anger), however, is not lamentation but ownership: "I did this; it is part of my history; I will not pretend it did not happen, I will carry it." Lamentation tries to flee the past; repentance shoulders it.

There is a fine distinction here, and it matters for young comrades: Owning is not approving. To own a mistake is not to say "I'm glad I did it" but "I did it and I will answer for it." Conversely, owning a mistake without approving it is the only way to be able to change it. A denied mistake cannot be corrected, because there is nothing to correct.

Let us return to Kierkegaard's own life. He owned the breaking of his engagement to Regine all his life; he never defended it as "a good decision", but he never fled from it either. His journals are an unending reckoning with this decision. In his will he left his estate to Regine. Whether the decision was right is still debated. But that Kierkegaard carried its weight is beyond debate.

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The dark side: Abraham and decisionism

Kierkegaard is easy to love; that is why we must also say that he has a dangerous side. This is the blog's principle: when writing about Nietzsche and when writing about Fromm alike, we tried to acknowledge a thinker's contribution and show its limit.

In Fear and Trembling (1843) the pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio tells the story of Abraham, who takes his son Isaac to be sacrificed at God's command. From the ethical point of view Abraham's act is attempted murder; it cannot be explained or justified to others. Kierkegaard calls this the teleological suspension of the ethical: the suspension of the universal moral law for the sake of a higher end. Abraham's "knighthood of faith" lies in remaining bound, alone, trembling but to the end, to a decision for which he can answer to no one.

Kierkegaard tells this story not as a model but as a horror; the book is not called Fear and Trembling for nothing. But a family of thought emerges from the text, and in the twentieth century that family arrived at a terrible place: decisionism. The thought that seeks the rightness of a decision not in its content but in the decision itself, in resoluteness, in the "sovereign" will of the exceptional moment.

The best-known example is Carl Schmitt. Schmitt ends the first chapter of Political Theology, published in 1922 — the chapter that opens with the sentence "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" — with a quotation from an unnamed "Protestant theologian". That theologian is Kierkegaard, and the quotation comes from Repetition: the exception explains the general. Eleven years later Schmitt joined the Nazi Party; the following year he wrote the article titled "The Führer Protects the Law".

This is not to hold Kierkegaard responsible for fascism. But it shows this: ownership cut off from accountability easily turns into arbitrariness. The sentence "I made this decision with passion and I stand behind it" is, in a structure where the decision-maker answers to no one, the most dangerous sentence of power. The cult of action we saw when writing about the line running from Futurism to techno-fascism, the praise of acting before thinking, the slogan "move fast and break things", are relatives of this family too.

So let us draw the distinction from the beginning of the piece once more, this time in political language: Responsibility is not standing behind the decision but being able to account for it. Standing behind it can be done alone; accounting for it requires another party, a partnership, a community.

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The single individual and the crowd: a Marxist critique of Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard's whole thought revolves around one concept: the Single Individual (den Enkelte). Truth lies not in the crowd but in the single individual standing alone before God. His famous formula is: "The crowd is untruth."

There is a valid intuition in this formula. The crowd is where responsibility is dispersed and lost. "Everyone was doing it", "those were the orders", "I am only a cog" are the sentences with which the individual hides their own choice behind the crowd. Kierkegaard's critique in Two Ages of the press, of the phantom called "the public", of a gossip culture in which everyone talks but no one takes responsibility, can be read today as if it had been written about social media.

But here is the problem: from this intuition Kierkegaard draws a conclusion that rejects all collective action. In his eyes the revolutionary crowds of 1848, democratic movements, politics based on numbers are all forms of the same "levelling". In 1848, when absolutism ended in Denmark and Europe was shaken by revolutions, Kierkegaard's worry was not the hunger of the poor but the "mass" swallowing the individual. Another text published in London the same year, The Communist Manifesto, looked at the same crowd with entirely different eyes: when the crowd organises, it becomes a class; and the class is not where responsibility is dispersed but where it is shared.

The Marxist tradition has settled accounts with Kierkegaard on three levels.

1. Lukács: the root of irrationalism. In The Destruction of Reason (1954), Lukács reads Kierkegaard as the philosophical expression of the post-1848 European bourgeoisie's flight from history and society. In Kierkegaard, history becomes insignificant before the individual's "inner" decision; objective social relations vanish in favour of subjective "existence". For Lukács this is the way the bourgeois intellectual "deepens" without questioning their own social position. Lukács's critique is at times too harsh; but at its core it is on target: a concept of responsibility that leaves history outside leaves half of responsibility outside.

2. Adorno: the interior. The young Adorno's first book, published in 1933, is on Kierkegaard. There Adorno uses a striking image: the bourgeois interior (intérieur). What Kierkegaard calls "inwardness" is the philosophical counterpart of the nineteenth-century bourgeois sitting room, curtained, thickly carpeted, insulated from the outside world. Outside there are factories, streets, hunger; inside, the soul, alone with God, weighs its own infinity. Remember that Kierkegaard wrote without ever working, on the fortune inherited from his father. This is not a personal accusation; but knowing under what material conditions a thought becomes possible helps us understand that thought's limit. When did a weaver who spent twelve hours a day in the factory have time to exist as "the single individual before God"?

3. Sartre: the singular universal. The most interesting reckoning comes from Sartre. In 1964, at the "Living Kierkegaard" meeting organised by UNESCO in Paris, Sartre gave a talk titled The Singular Universal. In this period, as he turned towards Marxism, Sartre tried to rescue a point on which Kierkegaard was right: history, classes and structures are real; but the concrete human being who lives, chooses and is anxious within those structures is also real, and no structural analysis can dissolve them entirely. Sartre's formula tries to hold Kierkegaard and Marx in the same sentence: a human being is the sum of what has been made of them and what they themselves make.

Let us bring these three critiques together:

What Kierkegaard saw	What Kierkegaard could not see
Choice is the constitution of the self; the person who does not choose does not have a self	That choices are made under conditions the person did not choose
Responsibility is facing the decision, before the rightness of the outcome	That responsibility is completed not only in conscience but in practice and in accountable structures
The crowd can be the place where responsibility is dispersed and lost	That the organised collective can be the place where responsibility is shared
Anxiety is the inevitable companion of freedom	That part of anxiety is not existential but the product of social precarity
Repentance is not denying the past but shouldering it	That the past is not an individual but a social and historical accumulation
Mass communication can produce an irresponsible phantom called "the public"	That behind this phantom lie the property relations of the press and of communication
The state church has turned faith into a civil service	That this critique can open onto a general critique of the class function of institutions

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From conscience to organisation: where is responsibility completed?

Now we can come to the real question. The question "Can I take responsibility for the decision I made?" can and should be asked in the inner world of the individual. But it cannot be completed there.

Marx wrote the reason on the first page of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Chapter I</a>

This sentence does not refute Kierkegaard; it completes him. People choose — Kierkegaard is right. But they did not choose the conditions they choose in — Marx is right too. So taking responsibility for a decision requires two things at once: owning your own share and analysing the conditions that shaped the decision. Without the first, responsibility turns into evasion; without the second, into self-flagellation.

The ideology of "personal responsibility"

It is not hard to see in today's Turkey why this distinction is vital. One of the favourite words of the neoliberal era is "personal responsibility". The unemployed person "has not developed themselves enough"; the indebted person "could not manage their spending"; the worker killed in a workplace homicide is filed in the reports under "carelessness" and "personal error". Decisions are made at the top; the boss sets the length of the shift, the scaffolding materials, the occupational safety budget, the pace of production. But the responsibility is dumped at the bottom.

This is a caricature of Kierkegaard's concept of ownership: forcing those who have no authority to decide to bear the consequences of the decision. It is the operation we showed when exposing the neoliberal opiates: turning a social problem into a problem of individual attitude. This gap between responsibility and authority is the class relation itself. So the first question of any honest discussion of responsibility is: Who made this decision, and who is paying its price?

Self-criticism: the measure of earnestness

The question Kierkegaard asks at the individual level has a counterpart at the collective level, and the Marxist tradition calls it self-criticism. In 1920, in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin formulated it like this:

"The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class and the working people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification — that is the hallmark of a serious party."

<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, Chapter VII</a>

Put this sentence next to Judge Wilhelm's passage. Both speak of earnestness. In Wilhelm, earnestness is what allows a person to discover that they chose wrongly; in Lenin, earnestness is being able to acknowledge the mistake openly and analyse its conditions. The difference is the change of scale: in Kierkegaard the account is given to God; in Lenin, to the class and the masses. The organisational name for what Kierkegaard calls "choosing oneself in repentance" is self-criticism.

But let us add a warning at once: self-criticism too has been corrupted in the course of history. In some periods and in some structures, "self-criticism" turned into a ritual of submission imposed from above, a ceremony of self-accusation for those below. This is the organisational form of the self-flagellation row in the table showing the difference between defending and owning: self-flagellation taking the place of analysis. Genuine self-criticism does not run from the top down; it starts at the very top; whoever made the decision is the first to give an account.

The blameless review: a lesson from the world of computing

One of the best-functioning contemporary examples of this distinction comes from an unexpected place, the everyday practice of computing labour. When a team running large systems experiences an outage, a data loss or a serious error, the report written afterwards is called a "post-incident review". Good teams do this review blamelessly: the aim is not to find an answer to "who made the mistake?" and punish someone, but to answer "what conditions made this mistake possible, and what must we change so that it does not happen again?"

The logic is this: when people know they will be punished, they hide the mistake; a hidden mistake grows. When people can open up about a mistake safely, the mistake becomes material for the system's learning. Blamelessness is not irresponsibility: the review requires the person to explain openly their own decision and the information they had when making it. But it does not leave responsibility in the individual's conscience; it carries it to the process, the tools, the conditions and the distribution of decision-making authority.

This is where Kierkegaard's individual ownership and Marx's analysis of conditions meet in a workplace practice. And let us note this too: this culture works only where the worker is sure they will not be fired for disclosing their mistake. That is, even the blameless review is, in the end, a question of security and organisation.

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Knowingly and willingly: the responsibility of those who choose the struggle

Now we come to the most important section of this piece. Up to here we have mostly discussed responsibility through mistakes: through what we do when a wrong decision has been made. But responsibility also has another face. That face is the road believed to be right, whose cost is known from the start, and which is chosen anyway.

People who have set out to transform life — the worker who goes on strike, the young person trying to bring the union into the workplace, the journalist who writes despite censorship, the pensioner who takes to the square against the cost of living or the villager who defends their forest — often choose this road knowingly and willingly. They know they may lose their job, be blacklisted, be detained, that their family will worry, that their years will be hard. Still, they believe that action is needed for a world worthy of human beings. And they carry themselves the responsibility for everything they will go through in return.

The highest form of what Kierkegaard calls "choosing to choose" is, in our view, this. But we cannot fully understand this choice with Kierkegaard's concepts. To understand it we need dialectical materialism.

A seventeen-year-old schoolboy's essay

In the summer of 1835, in Trier, a schoolboy wrote a German essay for his final examination. The subject was what a young man should consider when choosing a profession. The pupil's name was Karl Marx. In the essay two observations stand side by side.

The first is a warning Kierkegaard could also have signed. We appear to make our choice ourselves, but we are not entirely free:

"But we cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them."

So the seventeen-year-old Marx could already see that choice is not independent of conditions. The seed of the sentence he would write seventeen years later in the Eighteenth Brumaire is here.

The second is something Kierkegaard never wrote:

"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work."

<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/marx/1835-ref.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Marx, "Reflections of a Young Man on The Choice of a Profession", 1835</a>

Read the two passages together. The first describes necessity, the second freedom. Dialectical materialism's view of choice is not to separate the two.

Freedom is the comprehension of necessity

The fundamental difference between Kierkegaard's choice and the choice of the comrade who chooses the struggle lies in how freedom is understood.

In Kierkegaard, freedom is the dizziness at the edge of the cliff. It is a possibility guaranteed by nothing, opening onto the void at every moment. Choice is a leap in the face of that void.

In dialectical materialism, by contrast, freedom is not a leap made into the void. Engels formulates it in Anti-Dühring, with an idea inherited from Spinoza and Hegel:

"Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends."

In Hegel's words, "necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood." We discussed this in detail in our Spinoza piece.

The choice of the comrade who chooses the struggle is free in this sense. They choose not out of blind faith but by grasping how society works. They know where exploitation comes from, why crises recur, through which struggles their rights were won and through which lack of organisation they were lost. The road they choose is not a belief that history will go somewhere of its own accord, but a taking of sides based on knowledge of the tendencies within history. Kierkegaard's knight of faith chooses without knowing, relying on the absurd. The militant chooses knowingly. Knowing does not abolish anxiety, but it gives it ground to stand on.

Taking sides: against indifference

In 1917, at the age of twenty-six, Antonio Gramsci wrote a short piece titled I Hate the Indifferent:

"I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being citizens and partisans. Indifference and apathy are parasitism and cowardice, not life."

This sentence is the harshest answer ever given to Kierkegaard's aesthete. The aesthete thinks that by choosing nothing he keeps all doors open. But in a class society not choosing is also a choice: it is choosing the existing order. Neutrality is the politest way of standing on the side of the powerful. So next to the question "Did I make the right decision?", a third question is added in a class society: "Whom does not deciding serve?"

Who pays the price? The class inequality of choice

Here we have to be honest: the cost of choosing the struggle is not the same for everyone.

What a holding company executive calls "a hard decision" is closing a factory. The factory's workers pay the price; the executive's life goes on as before. What a worker calls "a hard decision" is joining a union. They pay the price themselves: with their job, their bread, sometimes their freedom. In the decisions of the ruling class, the decision and the cost are in different hands. In the worker's decision to struggle, both are in the same hand.

That is exactly why the responsibility taken on by the worker who chooses the struggle is, morally, the heaviest responsibility. It reverses the gap we saw in passing from conscience to organisation — the decision made at the top and the cost dumped at the bottom: knowing the cost, the decision-maker carries it themselves.

But precisely for this reason, this responsibility must not be carried alone. Here we part decisively from Kierkegaard:

• Kierkegaard's Abraham is alone. He cannot explain, cannot share with anyone. Moreover, it is not he who pays the price but his son Isaac.
• The militant, by contrast, is together with their comrades. They explain their decision, discuss it, share it. They do not make others pay the price; they put their own comfort on the line, not someone else's life.

The solidarity fund that stands by the family of a fired trade unionist, the comrades waiting at the door of a detained friend, the soup carried to the strike tent: these are the organisational form of responsibility. An organisation's morality is measured above all by how it treats the member who pays the highest price. The person who chooses the struggle carries the responsibility of their own choice; the organisation carries that person's responsibility. Without this reciprocity, the road chosen "knowingly and willingly" leads to loneliness and burnout.

A warning against the cult of heroism

At this point let us also close the door on a misunderstanding. Carrying the responsibility of choosing the struggle does not mean sanctifying self-sacrifice. Glorifying pain, treating paying a price as a virtue in itself, the feeling that "the more I suffer, the more right I am" — this is a trap inherited from Kierkegaard's Christian ethic of asceticism; it is not a Marxist ethic.

That is why the sentence in Marx's essay matters: burdens do not bow us down because they are sacrifices made for the benefit of all. The criterion is not the size of the suffering but the outcome of the action. The responsibility of the comrade who chooses the struggle is not only to accept the cost but not to pay it in vain. And that means calculating, organising, avoiding unnecessary risk, protecting yourself and your comrades, thinking for the long haul. The runner who is exhausted in the first kilometre of a marathon is not a hero. Responsibility includes being able to reach the end of the road.

A dialectical materialist vision

Now let us gather this whole discussion together with the basic concepts of dialectical materialism. When we set Kierkegaard's theory of individual choice on a materialist footing, five relations emerge.

a) The individual and the class: from class in itself to class for itself. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx distinguishes two states of the working class: the "class in itself", which is a class against capital because of its economic position but is not conscious of it, and the "class for itself", which becomes conscious of its own interests and organises. This transition does not happen spontaneously; it happens through the choices of individual people. Every moment a worker walks through the union's door is a small part of the class's passage from being in itself to being for itself. What Kierkegaard calls "choosing oneself" is, in materialist language, choosing one's class.

b) From quantity to quality. A single person's decision does not change history. But decisions that add up turn, at a certain threshold, into a qualitative leap. In a workplace first one person, then five, then the majority join, and one day the union wins recognition. Those who carry the responsibility of individual choices are the ones who make this leap possible. Kierkegaard's individual leap reappears in dialectics as a collective qualitative transformation.

c) Contradiction and movement. Choice and condition, individual and collective, freedom and necessity are not mutually exclusive opposites but opposites that require each other and turn into each other. Human beings are the product of conditions, but it is human beings who change conditions. This contradiction does not disappear by being resolved; it is continually reconstituted and carried forward within practice.

d) The negation of the negation: the mistake is preserved by being overcome. Hegel's concept of Aufhebung — at once abolishing, preserving and raising to a higher level — is the dialectical formula of our relationship with mistakes. A wrong decision is negated: it is corrected. But it is not erased: its lesson is preserved and the next decision is made with a higher consciousness. This is the philosophical ground of what Kierkegaard calls "choosing oneself in repentance" and of the self-criticism Lenin calls "the hallmark of a serious party". Defeats are like this too. The Paris Commune of 1871 was defeated, but its lessons were carried over into the organisation of 1917.

e) Practice is the criterion. Marx's second thesis on Feuerbach: the truth of thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. We understand whether a decision was right looking backwards; Kierkegaard is right about this. But the means of that understanding is not solitary introspection alone; it is the results of collective practice. The eleventh thesis is the last word of this whole discussion: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Kierkegaard did not stop at interpreting the world; he tried to change his own inner world. The comrade who chooses the struggle changes their inner world while changing the outer one.

Two choices, two worlds

Let us close this section with a table:

Kierkegaard's knight of faith	The comrade who chooses the struggle
Chooses without knowing, relying on the absurd	Chooses knowingly, relying on knowledge of social tendencies
Freedom is a leap into the void	Freedom is the comprehension and transformation of necessity
Cannot explain to anyone, carries it alone	Explains, discusses, carries it together with comrades
Gives account to God	Gives account to their class, their comrades and the future
Someone else (Isaac) pays the price	Pays the price themselves; does not make others pay
Suffering is the proof of faith	Suffering is a price that may have to be paid but is not to be glorified
The self is constituted in the single individual before God	The self is constituted in the practical relationship with their class and the world
The goal is individual salvation	The goal is a world worthy of human beings

Rosa Luxemburg ended her last article, written on 14 January 1919, the day before she was murdered, after the defeat of the Spartacist uprising, with three words spoken in the voice of the revolution: "I was, I am, I shall be." This is a sentence of responsibility spoken in the middle of defeat. It neither denies nor beats its breast. It accepts the defeat, analyses its causes in the lines of that article and says the road goes on. This is the counterpart, on the scale of history, of what Kierkegaard calls "choosing oneself".

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To young comrades: what is to be done?

What to do as you read Kierkegaard and close the book is not to question yourselves even more — most of you already question yourselves enough. Let us be concrete.

1. Change the question at the moment of decision. When making a decision, put a second question next to "Is this right?": "If this turns out wrong, to whom and how will I explain its consequences?" If you cannot answer that question, the decision is not yet ripe.

2. Write your decisions down. On the day you make a decision, write in two or three sentences why you made it, what information you had and what could lead you to change your mind. "Life can only be understood backwards" — but if, looking back, you do not remember your reasons on that day, you will either acquit yourself unfairly or blame yourself unfairly.

3. Do not treat changing your mind as defeat. The sentence "That is what I knew that day; today I know something else" is not a confession of weakness but the signature of a thinking person. Consistency is not persisting in error; it is persisting in method.

4. Do not confuse self-flagellation with analysis. Tearing yourself to pieces after a mistake is not taking responsibility. Write down your own share and the share of the conditions separately. Decide what you will do about your own share, and what you will do about the conditions and with whom.

5. Expose the gap between authority and responsibility. When a mistake is discussed at your workplace, your school or your organisation, be the one to ask the first question: "Who made this decision?" In every structure where responsibility flows down and authority flows up, the discourse of "personal responsibility" is a class instrument.

6. Start self-criticism at the top of your organisation. If a mistake is to be discussed in a union, an association or a collective, let the body that made the decision first explain its own share. Self-criticism that does not start at the very top is a ritual of submission.

7. Build spaces where mistakes can be opened up safely. In your meetings, after an action or an event, hold a "blameless review": What had we planned, what happened, why did it turn out differently, what will we change next time? Talk about the process, not names. This habit is an organisation's capacity to learn.

8. Do not hide behind the crowd, but do not flee the organisation either. Take Kierkegaard's warning seriously: "Everyone was doing it" is not a justification. But do not take his conclusion seriously: fleeing the crowd does not mean being left alone. Drawing the line between the crowd in which responsibility is dispersed and the organisation in which responsibility is shared is your task.

9. Accept the cost, but do not pay it in vain. Choosing the struggle is not taking on every risk. Calculate before acting: What does this step win, what does it cost, who will pay that cost, is the organisation ready to cover it? Do not glorify pain; not burning out is also a responsibility.

10. Read Kierkegaard — but with Marx beside him. Read the second volume of Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death; these texts contain some of the deepest things ever said about the human inner world. But jot a small note in the margin of every page: Under what conditions does this person live, and who determines those conditions?

11. And organise. Behind every point on this list stands this one. A person alone can carry the responsibility for their decisions only in their own conscience. Organised people carry that responsibility towards one another, correct one another, learn together. Do not leave the comrade who pays the price alone: a solidarity fund, visits, legal support, standing by their family are the concrete forms of sharing the responsibility for their choice. As Marx says in his third thesis on Feuerbach: the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human self-change can be grasped only as revolutionary practice.

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Dear Comrades,

The most valuable thing Kierkegaard left us is not an answer but a question. "Did I make the right decision?" is often a question without an answer: at the moment of decision we cannot know, and when we know later, it is too late. "Can I take responsibility for the decision I made?", however, can be asked at any moment and answered at any moment. This is the quiet revolution Kierkegaard made in the history of philosophy: moving responsibility from the rightness of the outcome to the honesty of ownership.

But Kierkegaard asked that question in a closed room, behind thick curtains, alone with God. When you open the curtain, there are other people outside: those affected by your decisions, those who decide with you, those who decide in your name and those who pay the price in your place. Responsibility is completed where that curtain is opened.

And outside the curtain, in the street, at the workplace, in the square, there are people who answer this question anew every day. Comrades who have set out to transform life, who have chosen this road knowingly and willingly, and who carry on their own shoulders the responsibility for everything they will go through in return. Their choice is made not at the edge of the cliff that Kierkegaard gazed at in anxiety, but within history. Not alone, but together. Not for their own salvation, but for a world worthy of human beings. What they teach us is this: responsibility begins as a burden, but when it is shared it turns into strength. And as the seventeen-year-old Marx said, the happiness of the one who chooses to work for humanity is not a petty, selfish happiness; it belongs to millions.

Own your choice. But do not defend it like a fortress; walk it like a road. If it turns out wrong, correct the course — and do not do it alone.

In comradeship

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Related pieces of ours

This piece is a link in the series under the blog's #philosophy tag. Related titles:

Portraits of philosophers — the philosophy series

• The Man Who Wept for the Commune — the axis of "what the enemy saw rightly"
• From Having to Being: Reading Erich Fromm with Class — "escape from freedom" and the social root of anxiety
• Spinoza and the Roots of Materialist Dialectics — freedom built on the knowledge of necessity
• From Futurism to Techno-Fascism — the cult of action and the relatives of decisionism

Method and everyday life

• Why Philosophy in the Digital Age?
• Not Dogma but a Living Method: What Does Marx Mean for Us?
• From the First Axe Stroke to Revolutionary Practice — the question of the subject of transformation
• The Dialectic of Everyday Life and a Guide to Survival
• Sending Intentions to the Universe, or Changing the World? — the ideology of "personal responsibility" and the neoliberal opiates

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Sources

Kierkegaard's texts

• Søren Kierkegaard (Victor Eremita), Enten — Eller, 1843. English: Either/Or.
• Søren Kierkegaard (Johannes de silentio), Frygt og Bæven, 1843. English: Fear and Trembling.
• Søren Kierkegaard (Constantin Constantius), Gjentagelsen, 1843. English: Repetition.
• Søren Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis), Begrebet Angest, 1844. English: The Concept of Anxiety.
• Søren Kierkegaard, En literair Anmeldelse: To Tidsaldre, 1846. English: Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age.
• Søren Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus), Sygdommen til Døden, 1849. English: The Sickness unto Death.
• Søren Kierkegaard, Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed, written 1848, published 1859. English: The Point of View for My Work as an Author (the note "The crowd is untruth").
• Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, note from 1843: "Life can only be understood backwards…"
• <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Søren Kierkegaard"</a>

Marx, Engels, Lenin

• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, Chapter I</a>
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845</a>
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/marx/1835-ref.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karl Marx, "Reflections of a Young Man on The Choice of a Profession" (Betrachtung eines Jünglings bei der Wahl eines Berufes), 1835</a>
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, Chapter II, §5</a>
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1878, Part I, "Morality and Law. Freedom and Necessity"</a>
• Friedrich Engels, Schelling und die Offenbarung, 1842.
• Antonio Gramsci, "Odio gli indifferenti", La Città futura, 11 February 1917.
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Rosa Luxemburg, "Order Prevails in Berlin", Die Rote Fahne, 14 January 1919</a>
• <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, Chapter VII</a>

Critiques and debates

• Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, 1954. English: The Destruction of Reason.
• Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, 1933. English: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic.
• Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'universel singulier", Kierkegaard vivant (UNESCO colloquium, Paris, April 1964), Gallimard, 1966.
• Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 1922 — the unattributed Kierkegaard quotation at the end of the first chapter.

Social psychology and practice

• Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails, University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
• Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957.
• Hal R. Arkes, Catherine Blumer, "The Psychology of Sunk Cost", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 35, 1985.
• <a href="https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Betsy Beyer et al. (eds.), Site Reliability Engineering, O'Reilly, 2016 — "Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure"</a>

The quotations from Kierkegaard, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci and Luxemburg in this piece follow standard English translations, lightly adapted; the Judge Wilhelm passage is given in summary. We have noted in the text that the views in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works cannot be attributed directly to their author.

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