Abstract

Kierkegaard’s notions of mood and earnestness are underlined by two understandings of equality. Mood conceives of our equality in mortality as the fate common to all human beings, where existence is comprehended in natural or biological thought categories. On such a view, man’s essence is to be regarded as a corporal substance that can be fully appropriated or posited; consequently, our common humanity is reduced to formal equality in annihilation that ignores individual distinctiveness and differences. Earnestness, by contrast, understands human beings’ equality in mortality as a share in a quality that cannot be fully posited, recognized or appropriated—an equality (un-)grounded in our essential communality and solidarity before God. I thus conclude that earnestness involves an ambiguous notion of responsibility: while the proper relation to one’s demise is a personal task that seems to isolate the individual from human association, earnestness points to an original dimension of communality within the individual, a shared space in which the person is called to be responsible towards her neighbor.