KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FIVE

 KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FIVE

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

© May 20, 2012

ANTICIPATING DISINGENUOS TIMES

Kierkegaard could see that putting the face of sincerity on insincerity would become endemic in the future.  Through war, disappointment and deprivation, people would weary of living authentic lives, and would feel more at home playacting as if someone else in a more surreal world. 

The ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, the playing with thematic nuances, the coquettish crackle of style over substance, the face of calm in the midst of agitation would win psychological approval for an age refusing to accept the face of maturity.

The Danish philosopher could see fresh and lively originality with elemental inexhaustibility, and passion broken into a myriad of facets that would generate a smoldering intensity that would burst into unnecessary wars but also a torrent of creativity.

The source of the torment was a society that never wanted to acknowledge much less experience the drift of time, or the necessity to change or grow old.  Kierkegaard saw this firsthand.  He could see the establishment ignoring and denying the charge to modernity with the eternally young, fiery and restless not letting up.  They were consumed daringly with ideas and vaulted over the stars to throw society, as it was known, down into the abyss.  He was writing about mid-nineteenth century Europe, but could have been writing about today:

“Time has asserted its rights.  Some things have been consigned to the past.  But now the ideality of recollection will cast a brilliant light upon the entire performance, an incarnation that was not present in those first days of youth.

 Only in recollection is there absolute rest, and this is precisely why there is also the quiet fire, the imperishable glow of the eternal.  And she rests reassured in the eternity of her essential genius.  She has no childish or wistful longing after the flames of what has disappeared.  Her metamorphosis has left her too ardent and too rich for that.  Like an idealizing light, this pure, reassuring, and rejuvenating recollection will illuminate the entire performance, which will become completely transparent in that illumination."

It is this notion of reliability, the imperishable glow of recollection that we have come to live in the past while going forward, playing roles that are etched in history, but not wavering from the same anachronistic footprints.  To Kierkegaard’s mind, it is the nature of our cultivation:

“The elasticity of the inner being is indeed the measure of essential cultivation.  A serving girl who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated.  A man of the common people who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated”

He sees cultivation in sincerity, in duty, in responsibility, and in action, and he sees this best demonstrated in the common man and least evident in those that hold power.  He turns the guns on his own class of affluence and privilege that has become so reflective that exploration and explanation have led to end in descriptive analysis, a comfortable distance from real problems and issues.  He writes:

“The present age is essentially reasonable, reflective, without passion, flaring up in fickle enthusiasm and shrewdly relaxing in indolence . . .A passionless and reflective (age) transforms the expression of strength into a dialectical tour de force: it permits everything to continue to exist but cunningly deprives it of meaning.  Instead of culminating into a rebellion, it ends by exhausting the inner reality of things in a reflective tension that permits everything to continue to exist while transforming the whole of existence into something ambiguous.”

What did we learn from Vietnam to explain Iraq and Afghanistan?  What did we learn from Enron to explain Wall Street corruption and the economic collapse of 2008?  What did we learn from the HIV epidemic to explain the scourge of pseudoephedrines and methamphetamines?  It would appear nothing.

We declare war on crime, on drugs, on terror, or whatever currently is in the collective social conscience, but we manage, in our reflective state, never to deal with the root causes, and so these problems drift with time.   

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We are a reflective society but not a problem solving society.  The tool of reflection on the one hand exposes religious illusions (and the cultural illusions with which religious illusions are connected), and on the other hand directs our attention to the immediate, to the simple, to how it registers with the common man. 

Pathos, Kierkegaard tells us, is grounded in the principle of contradiction.  We see it in the histrionics of the current presidential campaign.  The play is on fear treated as fact, the past as blueprint or foil to the future.  Words become the equivalent of action, promises the nourishment at the dinner table.  The principle of contradiction is meant to discourage the common man from thinking of anything else than the juxtaposition of the contradictions.  These have the lightness of air but can drive one to distraction if not destruction.  Kierkegaard adds:

“Enthusiasm is the unifying principle in a passionate age and envy is the negatively unifying principle in a passionless highly reflective age … Close air always becomes noxious; thus, when it is not ventilated with action, with events, closed-in reflection becomes the most reprehensible envy.”

One can only imagine what Kierkegaard would think of the synthetic age that technology has created.  Facebook has 900 million in what it claims as a global social connection when most of those so connected probably don’t know their next-door neighbors. 

One hundred years ago the automobile changed our psychosexual and cultural norms.  Today, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, among others, have been handed the challenge.  The automobile led us to concreteness, whereas information technology, which deals primarily in the abstract, is leading us away from each other while connecting us electronically with machines.  Kierkegaard saw the virtue of concretion as essential to prevent the individual from being reduced to a “public.”

The nineteenth century “Age of Reflection” created that irresponsible abstraction called, “the public.”

The public carries the power of suggestion to the ultimate unreality of polls, position papers, ethnic profiles, and demographics.  In our age, it has reduced meaning to sound bytes, statistics, algorithms, and mock scenarios in which no real people need participate. 

These self-fulfilling prophecies are treated as if they are indisputable projections and that people best abide by the findings.  Primary information, consistent with the principle of contradiction, information gained through direct experience and learning is relegated to being far less valid than second and third hand information.  Experts and authorities know best and show the way, and they have thrown us into the abyss.

The public, the ultimate display of the disingenuous, is not a people, not a generation, not a group, not a congregation, not an association or anything human because all of these are what they are by some connection, not concretion.  It could be said the public is everything and nothing at all, the most dangerous of powers and the most insignificant.  It is less than one single individual, however, unimportant as that person may be. 

Kierkegaard stresses again:

Only the person who is essentially capable of remaining silent is capable of speaking essentially; only the person who is essentially capable of remaining silent is capable of acting essentially.”

He recognized that he was explaining the inner conflict mainly of himself.  He writes:

“The person who is a child of the times but who wishes to fight against those times cannot do so with authority, as someone recognizable, as a prophet who wishes to lead a lost generation back to time honored ways of doing things.

Only by means of an action that involves suffering would the unrecognizable one dare to help leveling in its progress, and by means of this same suffering action he will pass judgment on the instrument used.  He does not dare defeat leveling straightforwardly.  That would be the end of him, because it would be acting with authority.  But in his suffering he will defeat it and will thereby express once again the law of his existence, which is not to command, govern, or lead, but to serve while suffering, to help indirectly.” 

The relevance of existential common man, then, according to Kierkegaard, is predicated upon the individual in the situation having the courage to make choices and decisions based on the principle of contradiction.  This was a striking but indirect force against the opposition in Kierkegaard's disingenuous age.  It might be the same in ours.

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