IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN

 IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 10, 2012

Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish existential philosopher, was considered socially aloof and politically conservative.  Writers to my missives have, on occasion, accused me of that stereotype.  True, my writing tends to be abstract, some might say vague, but none can ever accuse me of abandoning my common man roots. 

Kierkegaard was interested in the plight of the common man, especially during the early period of his writing when critics and adulators had not yet discovered him.  I have had the advantage of never being discovered in my long life.  Consequently, I’ve never been tempted to play to an audience or to escape this fundamental connection with my identity as to who I am, and what I am.  Indeed, I have taken pride in the fact that I’ve never left my working class roots.

Like Kierkegaard, I’ve written extensively about my relationship to my mother and father, my growing ambivalence about formal religion, especially my Irish Roman Catholicism, and about the influence of intellectuals (mainly dead authors) on my life. 

Kierkegaard came from a family engaged in the Protestant ministry, whereas I come from a family rooted in common labor.  The intellectual life was a luxury no one in my family could afford.  Words and ideas were suspect, as those who could take the bread out of our mouths usually spoke them. 

Somehow by dint of will and drive, and more than a little luck, I escaped this mad scrambling of basic existence, being allowed to take measure of what this world could offer a person if willing to make painful and hard choices early in life.   

With Kierkegaard, the role of Christian faith and its implications for social justice played an important part in the development of his philosophy.  I would say Irish Catholicism did in mine, often pitting me against the actual world observed, leading to a kind of cynicism that I share with the Danish philosopher. 

In a paradoxical way, it steeled me to an empathetic appreciation of things Jewish.  The best students I would encounter at university and in life, as well in books, would often prove members of that culture.  Were it not for Jewish authors I would have little to read.  Perhaps in a somewhat paranoid way, I could identify with a people who encountered exclusion as a matter of routine. 

What Kierkegaard taught me, and this is a take off on some of the things he said, was the importance of responsibility, a word that has lost its definitive meaning in our times.  Economic progress has more credence than either purpose or morality.  What is ethical and legal are treated as if synonyms.  Kierkegaard would scoff at this marriage of values. 

He made much of Christian identity, and that identity with common people.  The fact that identity is as porous as a sieve today defines our times as much as anything. 

We have become a society of cheaters masquerading as a society of achievers.  You cannot look at any fundamental institution of our society in which cheating has not been elevated to a distinctive virtue rather than the virus that it is.

The federal government expects people to cheat on their income tax.  Those most able to pay what they owe have the wherewithal to hire lawyers and accountants as professional cheaters to explore tax loopholes to their advantage.  No one raises a scintilla of protest. 

Some people don’t even bother to file their federal income tax returns, and when found out; only receive a slap on the wrists, when responsible citizens have been carrying them. 

Academics of our most celebrated institutions of higher learning know that academic grades are essentially meaningless, but are still a gauge to measure the prospective students readiness for college. 

Compounding this derisive situation, SAT and GRE prepared tests are part of the ritual of qualification for undergraduate and graduate school, when most students at our advanced high schools prep the prospective students their senior year for the test.  If this is not sufficient, there are review courses of likely questions to appear on the examinations.  Consequently, the whole affair is bizarre and measures nothing. 

It is no accident that largely enterprising young people disenchanted with formal education inventing a technology that is changing all of us have advanced this new age of information technology. 

Kierkegaard had no idea society would become so rootless as he witnessed the triumph of modern mass society in his abbreviated life (1813-1855).  But he did see the shenanigans surfacing of the movers and shakers cloaking themselves in religion, or religious ideals and principals, or abandoning them in agnosticism and atheism.  After his death, the right and left, and the middle claimed him as their prophet, when he belonged to none of them, as they had all abandoned the nuances of the common man.  They twisted his words, which were relevant only to his time, to have meaning for their causes and biases. 

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Kierkegaard was resolute in his belief in the common man, who would be willing to endure ostracism, rejection, exclusion and anonymity, indeed, even persecution from institutional society.  He maintained the common man's fundamental identity and integrity and responsibility as a caring, concerned and involved citizen. 

The common man was a man of principles and beliefs that had nothing in common with fair weather friends. 

The titles of some of Kierkegaard’s writings gives a clue to his engaging personality and philosophy: On the Concept of Irony (dissertation), Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Stages of Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love, Christian Discourses, and The Sickness Unto Death. 

The beauty of Kierkegaard, and I feel I share something in common with him here, is that it is impossible to classify his works.  He is Everyman.

ON INTERNAL SELF-DEFINITION

Kierkegaard could see even in his day that people attempted to define themselves in terms of others.  I have called this the problem of comparing and competing.  This imitation process results in one being a poor excuse for oneself.  For Kierkegaard, internal self-definition meant understanding oneself as an individual before relating to the many and to society, that is, we are all unique with unique gifts.  

It is impossible to connect the dots to the development of an inner world of the self if the focus is on how you stack up with others before you find out how you stake up with yourself. 

Kierkegaard saw this in his day in people fleeing from the requirements of reality, denying it, and then taking refuge in bad habits.  In our day, it is smoking and drinking and doing drugs, or becoming workaholics, anything to escape the reality of the inner life starving to be discovered. 

He believed, and I concur, the only way a person can discover his “real self” is to take charge of his inner life.  I have written that most of us fail to have an inner life, that we have lost our internal compass, and therefore our way.  In one of my books, I suggest, To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.  We care far more how people see us than how we see ourselves, believing we can fool ourselves if we get enough people to buy into our inauthentic self.

Kierkegaard was adamant in that a human being exists totally in choice, that is, that speculation cannot discern anything. 

It is a choice (his either/or proposition) that we choose what is good and beneficial to us or we speculate that we can possibly have it both ways, when he claimed the evidence suggest otherwise.  We cannot be a binge drinker on the weekends and be dry all week and expect to avoid the pain of choice.  In the end, a person’s relationship with self is an unmitigated ethical choice. 

I write about freedom, and how free it is to be engaged in life but at the same time to be a quintessential outsider.  Kierkegaard was an outsider who believed freedom means accepting one’s concreteness by transforming constricting necessity into voluminous reality.  This freedom means taking responsibility for all that only the individual knows is ethical, true and good.  Only then, he advises, can the entire ethical and aesthetic content of life be realized. 

I will end this brief essay (several on Kierkegaard may follow) by his sage reminder: However different the gifts and talents of different individuals may be, all are equal in their freedom to manage and develop their gifts.

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