First, in respect to existence, we will focus on particularity, the uniqueness of the individual, noting again that despair is a fragmentation of human existence at the point of selfhood.  The point at which one grasps personal uniqueness, or one’s own particularity, is precisely where the disintegration of despair resides.  It is the condition of the self in which factors such as “possibility” and “necessity,” “finite” and “infinite” (cf. Sickness unto Death), are split off from each other, each fragment deepening despair as it alternately dominates or succumbs to the other in the human struggle to be a particular self, an “individual” in the fullest sense.

Second, in respect to the eternal, at the same level of abstraction, we see the conjugate of particularity: universality.  In (Religiousness) A, universality is an unspecifiable notion associated somewhat vaguely with preexistence,  “the transcendent,” or the “Absolute,” which is “ubique et nusquam” (everywhere and nowhere).  However, universality, regardless of how well formulated as a principle, will prove to be only negatively and unredemptively related to the fragmentation of human particularity.  No conception of universality is any match for the ultimacy of the abyss.  Such conceptions only tend to undermine the significance of particular individuals rather than relieve their despair.  Thus, the interplay of these key conjugate properties—the despairing fragmentation of the particular versus the impotent allness of the universal---serves to intensify the negation and renunciation by which the modality of A as a whole is characterized.

The same conjugate properties pertain in the positive mode, Religiousness B, but now they and their relationality are transformed into key constituents of the unity of faith through confrontation with the God-man.  Complementarity continues to pertain between eternity and existence, but now they conjugate aspects of particularity and universality are constitutive of a positive condition.

The knight of faith, who for Kierkegaard exemplified existence as transformed, exhibits a profound sense of the universal significance of particularity in and for human nature.  Thus Kierkegaard’s scandalous claim that “subjectivity is truth” gains intelligibility in light of the conjugate relations between particularity and universality.  Kierkegaard is not advocating solipsism, nor is he even talking about nihilism—subjective immersion in the universal absurdity of the human situation.  Rather, he is making the claim that only through deeply indwelt particularity is universality able to be known and appropriated.  Logically, the universal is not truly universal if it does not embrace particularity per se.  This logical paradox, which appears in science as the problem of singularity, is resolvable at the human level only through faith and the transformative power of the God-man.  In faith, one is freed from conceptual and cultural illusions of universality (universal laws of nature, ethics, society, etc.)  in order to enter fully into God’s creation through the particularity of one’s own existence.  The surprise is that precisely through the full appropriation of one’s own particularity, universality comes to light everywhere in all creation.  Thus, Kierkegaard writes that the knight of faith “…takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things…Yet he does not do the least thing except by virtue of the absurd [the God-man received in faith].”

The God-man reverses and transforms the logical paradox in the relation of the universal and the particular precisely because that which is truly and fully universal (eternal) has already been manifested from the Godward side in the historical particularity (existence) of the God-man paradox.  Once the full and true nature of the universal has been revealed in a particular historical event, then by faith, existential particularity can be appropriated in and for its universal significance.  Thus the claim that “subjectivity is truth” is not subjectivism but a veiled reference (unveiled in its appropriation) to the incarnation, wherein the particular subject was, indeed, the bearer of all truth.

In this understanding, human existence should not be conceived dualistically (as in idealism) or mystically (as in some Eastern thought) as a covert bearer of the universal, as if human nature were divided half-and-half and could be unified only by yielding up existence to some vague nether state of eternal wholeness.  Rather, through the affirmation of human existence as transformed by the God-man, universality and particularity become definitive conjugate terms, positively correlated by means of the same model of complementarity of particularity and universality in the despair of void and meaninglessness.

The full colorful scope of this interplay between conjugate terms is exhibited in Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the knight of faith, but it must suffice here to say that two essential conjugate properties of human nature in the context of faith are: the eternal as universality actualized in the particular, and existence as particularity embodying the universal.