The tension between the extremes of reason and will, the two forms of unmastered irony which can for Blake and Kierkegaard equally negate life, in the realm of human community takes the form of an extreme tension between “the public” and “the private.” Indeed, this tension between public and private is for many the central difficulty or problem with Blake's and Kierkegaard's ideal of life, for their radical individualism threatens to undermine any public realm – political, social, or ethical – whatsoever, and may in fact underlie the profoundly vexed question of their politics (that is, the question of what politics their radical individualism entails). This individualism is why despite their resistance to the perspectivisms of radical Nietzschean irony Blake and Kierkegaard belong finally more within the tradition of Nietzschean philosopher-poets concerned with the project of self-creation than within any tradition of sociopolitical philosophers of community or human “solidarity.”