KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- THREE

 KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – THREE

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

© May 15, 2012

Soren Kierkegaard tells the story of a man with a bundle of laundry in desperate need to have it attended to, seeing signs in a window “QUALITY CLEANING,” “PROMPT SERVICE,” “SAVE MONEY, DROP OFF YOUR LAUNDRY HERE!”

The man rushes into the shop, drops his laundry on a table, rushes out, and attends to his daily business.  Hour’s later, he returns to see the bundle still on the table as it was left.  He says to the proprietor, “What kind of business do you run here?  I dropped my laundry off hours ago and you haven’t touched it!”

The man shrugged his shoulders, “Dear, sir, we are a sign company, not a laundry.”

*     *     *

The problem examined in the previous missive was Kierkegaard’s “internal self-definition.”  We often assume what is not so, and then become angry when reality is brought to our attention, often to our embarrassment.  Such is the case with the idea of freedom and equality. 

Freedom and equality have little to do with what we assumed to be so.  It behooves us to treat these as privileges and not as storefront rights, so to speak, to get our laundry done.  If we do, it won't happen.  We cannot afford to buy the display window offerings.  They are often misleading.  

Kierkegaard saw the notion of the French Revolution's (1789) idea of freedom and equality having gone off the rails, leading to the Reign of Terror, and subsequent dictatorship of Rousseau and Robespierre to rival the draconian rule of Louis XVI, which it replaced.

There is always a danger to buy what is displayed in the window. 

Kierkegaard came to believe that his times fostered a largely unconscious drive to internal development in defiance of all external authority, especially in matters concerning religion.  My interest here is philosophical.

*     *     *

Those who read me know that I have reviewed (in these pages) three books by Gustave Le Bon about this period (The Psychology of Revolution, The Crowd: The Study of the Popular Mind, and The Psychology of Peoples).  Like Le Bon, Kierkegaard was interested in the growing unreasoning fanaticism and mystical figments of the popular imagination.  Common man was on the way to becoming a people. 

But this meant going through the briar patch of the crowd.  The crowd meant the same thing to him that it did Le Bon, a collection of untruths with the individual abandoning the personal self to the collective grouse of the crowd.

Kierkegaard differed with Le Bon in that he had the common touch, a capacity to see ordinary people with affection as with his own parents.  It was not in his character to be condescending or to act self-important, but to be cordial and straightforward with them. 

He saw the toxicity of the crowd a contemporary problem that could poison internal reflection; and therefore appropriate behavior.  For him, understanding followed by action was everything. 

*     *     *

Kierkegaard was not enamored of window displays, not inclined to accept words as substitutes for deeds, not in the business of accepting the rhetoric of freedom and equality as an expression of conscience.  For him, no man was better or less because of his station or circumstance.  Kierkegaard expresses this humbly:

How much is written about compassion toward those in need, how many examples are given, how often it is mentioned in the newspapers. And yet the best thing about it, the most endearing, the little psychological trait that gives the gift infinite worth, the trait that, if it is absent, turns the sum of money into jingling coins, is never described. 

I knew a man who himself lived in straitened circumstances, who did not have a great deal to give away, and whose name was never mentioned.  Yet I learned more from him than from all the stories in the newspapers.  Sometimes he gave to a poor person on the street, but when he gave he concealed it as much as possible, and he always removed his hat with as much respect for the poor person as if that person were his superior, and with as much friendliness as if that person were his equal.

We live in a time of façade, a time when much is promised from banners and storefronts, from political rostrums, and television commercials, from pulpits and news conferences, from every moment of our waking day.  Yet, in the final analysis, what makes us happy as well as whole, are those personal moments when we get inside the storefront of our minds to penetrate what is assumed to what is real, and in that reality, to purchase connection with the common man that exists in us all.

*     *     *