Kierkegaard, Marx, and MLK

I've been seeing a lot of people share some of their writing about MLK today, so at the risk of using today to sell books (but this is still America, right?), I thought I'd share a few paragraphs from the conclusion of my book, The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject. I don't claim to be an expert on MLK, but I've long thought that while he's obviously given credit as a moral exemplar and world-historical figure, he's not given the credit he deserves as a political theorist. And part of the reason might be that political theorists don't read Kierkegaard, or more broadly, that we don't always appreciate the importance of religious thought.

“Writing from jail and smuggling his words out on pieces of discarded newspaper, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. composed his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Responding to incrementalist clergy who preferred legal over direct action and who saw Dr. King’s political demonstrations as themselves the disruption, he urged his audience to look beyond a “superficial” social analysis that painted him as the problem and toward the “underlying causes”—only then would they understand that he had “no alternative.” Eloquently detailing the political history that led to direct action, Dr. King explains why demonstrations have become necessary, as otherwise he knows that change will not come. Moreover, rather than criticizing him for his demonstrations, he would have preferred that these clergy members “had commended” the demonstrators “for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation.” Citing the biblical prophets and the Apostle Paul as forebears, Dr. King states that he is in Birmingham because, like his predecessors before him, he is “compelled to carry the gospel of freedom.” The purpose of the present work has been to offer a philosophical articulation of this gospel of freedom.

Dr. King’s appeal—his “gospel of freedom”—rests on two interrelated points. First, it relies on a sense of love that he believes lies at the heart of Christianity, and which unites all humankind, for Jesus “was an extremist for love.” King writes of what follows from this: “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.” As King argues, bonds of community unite us all, so that an attack on one part is an attack on the whole. He cannot sit idly by and watch injustice unfold, for to do so would be an abdication of that part of himself through which he relates to others; it would an abdication of his love. In writing to the clergy who denounce his direct action, King makes an appeal to their love, he refers to a “higher moral law,” and he invites them to similarly break unjust laws, which, as Augustine argued, are really not laws at all. While the clergy members to which he wrote might not have been swayed, many among the larger audience were. And in being so swayed, they were taking a step in the direction of being better, and freer, human beings.

However, King’s appeal is not solely a spiritual appeal to our better nature; it is also a political argument. Love might provide us with the ethical commitment to break unjust laws—doing so “openly” and “lovingly”—but identifying these laws is not always easy, nor is determining how to act. Direct action is necessary because of the specific nature of southern segregation, because of the specific events in Alabama that brought him from Georgia, and because of Dr. King’s astute analysis as to the path toward justice. Love brings us to the world—a world comprised of other individuals—but there is little in love that will help with this political analysis, outside of a desire to recognize injustice and a commitment to its eradication. Love is not enough—it also requires thought and action. This is the story of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx.

Martin Luther King Jr. might seem a far cry from the philosophical battles of the mid- Nineteenth century, but he is not. Not only does he embody the ethical commitment to fighting injustice that this work has articulated, coupled with an acute mind for analyzing their systematic nature, but his intellectual development traces a direct lineage back to Kierkegaard himself—and also, less pronouncedly, to Marx. It is little secret that in addition to being influenced by the African American religious tradition in which he was raised, King had not only read Kierkegaard but was also greatly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Tillich and Niebuhr were themselves indebted to the theological revival initiated by Karl Barth, a revival in which Søren Kierkegaard played a foundational role. Moreover, both Niebuhr and Tillich were indebted to Marx, and to socialism more generally, so that Dr. King was situated precisely at the nexus of Kierkegaard and Marx. Granted, this was one or two steps removed, but his intellectual development took place in a world permeated by their thought. In fact, toward the end of his life, Dr. King became increasingly radicalized as he shifted his focus toward opposing the war in Vietnam and to combating poverty, in an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist direction that saw him drawing in more of what we might call Marx’s influence.

While we should not overstate the influence of Kierkegaard and Marx as a matter of intellectual history, as a lived embodiment of much of what this work has argued, it is hard to find a better example than Dr. King. In fact, given the entrenched nature of Protestant culture in the United States, coupled with the United States’ role as the sole capitalist superpower, it should be little surprise that it provides such a striking example of the unity of Kierkegaard and Marx. Moreover, given that Marx and Kierkegaard were both concerned with the lived reality of the truth of freedom rather than its philosophical transmission, it seems clear that they would have preferred the lineage of King to that of academic philosophers. Their thought was a thought of praxis; it took place in Copenhagen’s streets, Europe’s workers associations, and Dr. King’s Birmingham. As both Kierkegaard and Marx knew, the challenge of justice was not the challenge of intellectually apprehending it; the challenge was to live it. And Dr. King lived justice.”