What Kierkegaard Means by “the Neighbour”

When Kierkegaard writes about “the neighbour”, he is not naming the person who lives nearest, shares our outlook or has first earned our sympathy. The neighbour is every human being. The concept breaks the rule of preference by which love is ordinarily limited to those we choose, admire or recognise as “our own”.

The decisive discussions appear in You Shall Love the Neighbour and “You” Shall Love the Neighbour. They should be read together: the first clarifies who the neighbour is; the second presses the command upon the individual reader.

The Danish word Næsten

The older Danish text uses Næsten. “Neighbour” is the established English rendering in this biblical and Kierkegaardian setting. It should not be reduced to geographical proximity. The neighbour is the human being encountered under the command to love.

That definition is deliberately universal. If the neighbour meant only the person naturally close to us, the command would leave preference in control. Instead, neighbour-love asks how every human being stands in equality before God.

Does neighbour-love abolish friendship and family?

No. Kierkegaard does not require the abandonment of the beloved, the friend or the family member. His concern is that a preferred relationship can become a closed alliance: two people may love one another in a way that makes everyone outside their circle insignificant.

Neighbour-love asks particular relationships to remain open. A spouse, friend or child is not loved less truly when also recognised as a neighbour. The relationship is placed within a wider ethical responsibility rather than being allowed to define its own final law.

Equality without pretending differences disappear

Kierkegaard’s equality is not the claim that every relationship has the same history, intimacy or practical responsibility. We do not owe identical actions to a stranger, a dependent child and a lifelong friend. The point is more fundamental: none of these differences makes one person more or less a neighbour.

This prevents social rank, similarity, usefulness or admiration from becoming the measure of a person’s claim upon love. Difference remains real; superiority and exclusion lose their authority.

God as the middle term

For Kierkegaard, Christian love is not simply a direct agreement between an “I” and another “I”. God stands as the middle term. This changes the relationship from private possession into responsibility. The other person cannot finally be reduced to the role they play in my happiness, and I cannot make my changing inclination the sole measure of what I owe.

This theological claim also explains the stability Kierkegaard associates with duty. If love rests only upon preference, it may disappear when the preferred quality changes. If the other is loved as neighbour before God, change does not automatically cancel the task.

Why the quotation marks around “you” matter

The title “You Shall Love the Neighbour” places quotation marks around “you” because the discourse turns away from general discussion. It is easy to praise equality at a distance or to define love for humanity without loving an actual person. The command addresses the hearer.

This direct address also blocks a common evasion: using the doctrine of neighbour-love mainly to judge whether other people are loving enough. The first question becomes personal. Whom do I exclude through preference, resentment, social distance or an idealised picture of the kind of person worth loving?

Questions to carry into the text

• Where does affection become a closed circle?
• Which differences do I quietly treat as reasons why another person has less claim upon care?
• How can duty protect tenderness when mood or admiration changes?
• What would it mean to love an actual difficult person without denying truth about their actions?
• Am I applying the command first to myself or mainly to other people?

Continue with Our Duty to Love the People We See, where the question becomes still more concrete: love must meet the imperfect person who is actually present rather than search indefinitely for an ideal object.