KIERKEGAARD IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- TWO

 KIERKEGAARD IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- TWO

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

© May 13, 2012

REFERENCE:

In the initial discussion of Soren Kierkegaard’s ideas on “the common man,” mention was made of the importance of the individual going against the grain of established practices to assert his individuality by making choices, taking responsibility for his actions, and having the courage to live consistent with those choices. 

In his short life (1813 – 1855), many in the establishment felt Kierkegaard’s ideas were a little off the wall.  He was born during the Napoleonic Wars, and lived during the traumatic times that followed, times when less sense and more nonsense came to dominate.  Philosophers rise like Sphinx out of the ashes of such times. 

Kierkegaard saw the danger of the disappearance of common man.  He saw people becoming increasingly passive, going along with anachronistic routines as society was undergoing massive change. 

Fast forward nearly 100 years and we have World War Two with the Holocaust, the genocide, the atomic bomb, and the loss of more than 100 million lives in the conflagration. 

Kierkegaard’s ideas, dormant for these many years, suddenly attained relevance.

 

Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Dostoyevsky, Malraux, Beckett, and American writers such as Mailer and Miller found the Danish philosopher spoke to them.  This was also true of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Catholic theologian Gabriel Marcel, Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev. 

These theologians concurred with Kierkegaard’s idea that choice should be fully aligned with faith, whereas the humanistic writers were dismissive of abstract theories that disguised the untidiness of actual existence.  They emphasized the subjective reality of individual existence, individual freedom and the consequences of individual choices. 

My writing is consistent with this humanistic aspect whereas I find little purchase with faith as an anchor, although I am clearly not an atheist. 

We have been limping along ever since World War Two seeking economic splendor, while being shocked awake occasionally by reality, most recently by the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of New York City, and the subsequent "war on terror."

Since then, we have retreated from freedom, retreated from individualism, and retreated from the essence of the common man.  We have become enslaved to anxiety, or the fear of what might happen.  We wait for someone to lead us, to show us the way, to make decisions for us, to take care of us, to provide for us what only we can provide for ourselves, and that is an authentic existence in troubled times.

CARICATURE AND COMMON MAN

Kierkegaard understood that an authentic life could only be realized by obeying the ethical requirements of existence.  If we cheat, whatever the cheating may be, we ultimately cheat ourselves.  We become a caricature of ourselves rather than an authentic person.

The irony is that there has never been more opportunity to exercise the freedom of expression on so many levels, but never a time more difficult to be ourselves. 

There is an insane drive to be a celebrity; or to be the audience of celebrity, when celebrity is essentially a caricature of what is not real but imagined as an ideal. 

Even something as fundamental as “the news of the day” is not news of the day, but gossip and fear packaged as “breaking news.”  We have developed an ambulance chaser morality and prostituted mentality that is more interested in other people’s lives than in our own. News is as much a manufactured product as is a vacuum cleaner.  It collects dirt and distributes it as something with which to vicariously salivate. 

An insanely counterfeit world has evolved, and everyone is a part of that world.  We no longer live in quiet desperation.  We exalt in communal desperation on FaceBook.

Kierkegaard could see in the evolving mass culture of his day the way myth and fairy tale would be substituted for legitimate existence, where eternal struggle would be reduced to these opposite coordinates of the individual’s continuum. 

Authentic man, he feared, could disappear without a whimper blinded by obsessions.  He couldn’t have envisioned texting, emailing, or compulsively surfing the Internet most of our waking hours, but he could see mass materialism suffocating spiritual health and well being.  .

He saw egoistic instinct, the sense of self in the moment, clamored for attention, not as an expression of superiority but as a matter of survival.  Without basic morality, without a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, without a commitment to duty, it was impossible for him to see us ever becoming whole. 

We are not speculative creatures, he insisted, but action figures.  When the action is mainly passive, life is mainly inauthentic, driven by synthetic or arbitrary standards that value life in terms of attention, wealth, and power, and not involvement.  Culture becomes flat with courage reduced to hope.

Once words and actions are one, Kierkegaard said, there is no need for complicated contracts to legitimize commitment.   

If words and actions are not personal, there is no possibility for intimacy.

We now live in the world of stereotypes and caricatures, where they were only an idea for Kierkegaard.  For instance, media can create stick figures and then subliminally impregnate them into our minds by feeding our biases so that we are little aware that we have been reduced to one-dimensional.

In a strange way, the semi-mythical ideal types of  “Faust” and “Don Juan” play with the dialectic of the simple and wise, the demonic and the spiritual, especially with young people.  Kierkegaard writes:

“It is strange to see the younger generation, which certainly has something Faustian about itself, fasten onto Goethe’s version of the story.”

Kierkegaard was pleased that young people of his day read the book, and saw it rich bouquet as if a fine wine, a book that would show them the story went beyond myth to have relevance in their respective lives.  Rather than them seeing the book as a morality play, he hoped they would see Faust a personification of doubt, and the uncertainty of life.  Mephistopheles and God are not central characters in Goethe’s version of the story, but Faust himself, as the quintessential doubter.  Kierkegaard was a skeptic in the best sense of the word. 

The dichotomy of compliance and cooperation is consistent with this skepticism.  I express it this way:

(1)    Politeness stage: we think well of others because we want them to think well of us.

(2)    Suspicious stage: we protect ourselves by questioning them to realize their motives.

(3)    Fight/Flight/Adapt/Submit stage: we question for clarification (fight), become moody and taciturn but do nothing (flight), decide we have no choice (adapt), or surrender our will to another (submit).

(4)    Cooperation and Open Communication stage: our doubts are allayed with the stage set for establishing trust and collaboration. (Confident Selling for the 90s, p. 167)

Kierkegaard believed in the doubter's power filter (2) to work through our skepticism.  He saw, as I have experienced in my work, that often those in power, be they the church, the company or the state, expect to skip (2) and (3) to realize cooperation (4) when, in fact, they only experience compliance.

Kierkegaard is always thinking out loud as if he is a voice in our heads that needs to get past the noise that invades that space.  He desires we attend to our individuality.  He writes:

“I do not deny that it betrays weakness and that it would be a sign of greater strength to have the ability, like many fish, to remain at the bottom of the sea without feeling the need to play frequently on the surface like the sliver-glinting sunfish.  Nor do I believe that I am so weak that I would simply perish if that element were denied me . . .(Some people) who have greatest need of this sort of external encouragement are precisely those who do not find inscribed within themselves the path they must take . . . I feel that I have the strength to hold the mirror, whether it shows me my ideal or my caricature, those two extremes between which life constantly oscillates.”

What a delightful insight as we are often if not always caricatures of ourselves!  Kierkegaard had no sense that the caricature would one day be more real to us than the authentic self, as is the case today. 

I say this because conscience life – where life involves choices and the consequences of those choices -- has come to lack currency.  The evidence suggests we have become slaves to our appetites, indolent in our resolve, and self-satisfying mediocrities. 

Mass society has taken on the aspect of Gustave Le Bon’s crowd.  He writes:

“The crowd has no conscience, is blind to truth and confuses objective reality with subjective imaginings of the mind.”

Kierkegaard was weary of the crowd but did not take the psychological leap of Le Bon.  He cut straight to existential issues regarding the question of choice, to matters of taking a position, to making a decision, and then pursuing that decision as an expression of a growing awakening of the spirit of the common man.

*     *     *