KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- SIX

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – SIX

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

© May 30, 2012

THE WISE AND THE SIMPLE

You must remember as we take this journey with Kierkegaard that he encountered in his day similar problems to what we experience today.  And like today, coteries of the cultivated ignored or avoided him and his works politely.  In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he reminded readers they were steering clear of the complex problems they faced.  He claimed his age was caught in a self-contradiction.  By ignoring the principle of contradiction, they solved problem meant to produce positive results while disregarding actual problems encountered.  Think of a bell curve with only one end. 

People thought in absolute terms: those on one side thought everything they did was right and proper, and all those on the other side thought they were equally correct.  As a result, the culture of the times lacked genuine passion.  All its ideas evolved into principles, whatever the evidence to the contrary.  With passion spent, wrong became right, evil became good, dishonesty became honesty, and brilliance was believed to be able to build a case that would discourage the less wise to back off from suggesting otherwise. 

In this pseudonymous work, Kierkegaard attacked the cultivated unmercifully indicating he was the “unrecognizable one,” or as the “simple wise person.”  Thus he elevated the difference between the cultivated and the gifted with the simple and untutored with whom he identified.  He proffered such questions, “Isn’t simplicity exactly what the wise person finds most difficult to understand?”  He writes:

“When the child chatters away his chatter is perhaps simple enough, and when the wise person says exactly the same thing, it has perhaps become the most ingenious of things.  This is how the wise person relates himself to simplicity…the simple became something else, even though it in fact remains the same.  The more the wise person considers simplicity, then the more difficult it become for him.  and yet he feels himself seized by a profound humanity that reconciles him with the whole of life, namely that the difference between the wise person and the simplest person is merely this vanishingly small difference that the simple person knows the essential thing that the wise person little by little comes to know that he knows or comes to know that he does not know, but what they know is the same.”

In this observation, Kierkegaard is telling his society that the web of sophisticated definitions as to “what is” and “what is not,” ultimately must intersect with the reality that the “wise and simple” know in their bones because they exist in it, and don’t have the luxury of looking at it from afar. 

This was a warning and challenge to the coterie of the cultivated that it was living in a complacent past, but that the future belonged to the common man. 

The paradox for Kierkegaard was that he could not step forward with authority and rebuke his times because he himself was part of that which he believed had to be censured.  The curious product of this book, then, was that it represented his own soul-searching and therefore was a stage for his own self-education with him being just as much the reader as the author of the work. 

He came to discover speculative thinkers see the idea of paradox as something that needed to be abolished, whereas the simple person understands himself by means of the paradox.  He writes:

“The simple wise person (here he means himself) will immerse himself in grasping the paradox by arriving at the understanding that it does not exist.”

Then later:

“To understand that a human being is capable of nothing is equally difficult for a remarkably talented king and for a poor wretch, and is perhaps more difficult for the king because he is so easily tempted by the circumstances that he is capable of so much.”

The wise and simple person is tethered to the ground and is not given to wild speculation and the hubris of grandiose risk taking that has been demonstrated on Wall Street with other people’s money, often money of the wise and simple.  Kierkegaard is saying the cultivated people, not the common people are the problem. 

Towards the end of his career, he made the issue even more poignant by insisting that cultivation not only confused a person but also prevented that person from the attainment of true awakening.  We see evidence of that all around us today.  He writes:

“I am aware (of my) inability to elevate myself even slightly above the intellectual horizon of the lowest class.  I am aware of how closely it borders on satire that after spending time and energy for years, one ends up coming no further than to what the stupidest person knows.”

Kierkegaard is attacking the smugness of the speculative thinkers of his time, finding the common man as a person not given to being corrupted, as had the cultivated man.  Why: because the common man’s capacity for action had not been sapped by obsessive reflection.  Thus for Kierkegaard, the common man served as a foil and reinforcement for good because he was awake and it was impossible to awaken the cultivated man to the actual challenges before him.  One hundred fifty-seven years later, little seems to have changed.

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