KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- EIGHT

 KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – EIGHT

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

© June 8, 2012

IN SEARCH OF THE HONEST MAN

“When one does not focus upon the differences between one person and another, one has the consolation of being able to find in the common man an honest person who can and will understand,” Kierkegaard writes.  He goes on to say, “It is in ordinary people the greatest strengths are to be found.”

He was aware of the tensions between the common man and the disembodied Establishment.  Controlled by ambition, the Establishment often lost its way in quest of wealth, power, influence and popularity.  Yet, he warned, talent and ability without honesty were a search in vain for meaning.  Integrity was the preserve of common people as even their vices were excusable.

On the other hand, the “spoiled-child nonsense” of the coterie of the cultivated acted as if they had a license to cheat, steal, fornicate, corrupt and do as it pleased with impunity, as it possessed the light, the wisdom and the right to decide what was best, when its stupid decisions only impacted negatively the powerless.  Kierkegaard writes:

“To be in a position to live for an idea, to be able to expend all one’s time on it, is indeed closer to relating oneself to the ideal …But the people, the great mass of people who must spend most of their time in menial tasks, earning the necessities of life – with respect to them, it would be a terrible thing to jack up the price.  In their case, the humane thing is of course to provide consolation and gentleness, because the most fundamental worry and concern of these people can certainly be the pain caused by their inability to live for something higher …(Alas) it is just as important to be a maidservant, if that is what one is, as to be the most brilliant genius.  Thus is also the course of my almost exaggerated sympathy for the simple class of people, the common man.  And therefore I can become depressed and sad because they have been taught to laugh at me, thus depriving themselves of the one person in this country who has love them most sincerely.”

He saw the common man between bookends of the Establishment on the one hand and the mob and guttersnipes on the other, neither pursuing interests of the people.  He was tired of the cool superiority of his peers who avoided him for fear of being exposed to his taunts and insults.

Great men can, at times, be quite venial and self-pitying.  Kierkegaard was no exception.  To endless meanness and mockery from his peers and the press, he writes:

“I am not complaining even though it might seem to be a hard fate that I, who had I lived in any other country, would have earned a great fortune, would have been counted among the most eminent geniuses, and would have enjoyed wide and pervasive influence – by having been born in a demoralized provincial town, have quite predictably achieved status as a sort of local madman, known and insulated by (quite literally) every guttersnipe, even by convicted criminals … Only a dead man can stop and avenge such infamy, in which an entire nation is more or less implicated.  But all you who have suffered will be avenged .. Retribution is coming!”

It is perhaps easier for the outsider to be more honest than for insiders who must appear honest.  The outsider is not in the business of winning friends and influencing people for profit and prestige to the extent that the insider must to satisfy the demands of his station.  .

Kierkegaard pondered the unchangeable constant of human nature, the dichotomy between good and evil in the subterranean life of the soul as revealed in war and government, economics and academia, politics and religion.  He zeroed in on evil as it compromised defenseless good people, showing how these good people became servile and humble to the demands of the powerful when such evil was on display. 

He was forged by the cultivated world that rejected him and by the mob that attacked him, coming to see himself as the martyr of the moment.  He writes:

“The conflict, the world-movement, is between two concepts: the interesting and the simple.  The times have gone astray and continue to be carried away by the interesting.  The movement to the simple should be made …By falsifying my task I could have become the hero and idol of the moment.  If I had done so, I would indeed have abandoned the movement toward the simple and would have converted all my power into the interesting and into the moment.  I remained true to my task, understood in the eternal sense.  I became the martyr of the moment, and this is precisely the proof that I remained true to the task.”

The Danish philosopher was a walking paradox wrapped in a contradiction.  Little wonder he confused people.  To pursue truth he insisted required “awakening.”  Typically, when a religious sect claimed such awakening to truth, he took exception to such an assertion finding its truths untruths and therefore the awakening in error, expecting approval the sect instead felt his wrath. 

Kierkegaard saw his religious faith on a collision course with the wider world “that otherwise would have escaped me, overly concerned as I was with inner sufferings.”  This led to confusion, as he was not interested in the external circumstances of religion, but only in its existential dimensions.  In other words, he saw his faith, as practiced, an obstruction to awakening.

The continuing source of his pain was his inability to rally the common man, who had been his friend, to his understanding.  Instead, the common man came to laugh at him along with the others seeing him as an odd and comical person.  All his life he had talk about being an individual, and now he had become one in the highest existential way, “the incarnation of my category.”  

He had made his choice, and felt no envy for those who had backers, who held high office, or who were inclined to wear constant disguises.  It was 1849, six years before his death, and he was totally alone, God’s clown among men, the scourge of his church, in the snake pit of his times.  To protect himself from the disdain of people, the prudent course, it would seem, would be to withdraw, and laugh at the stupidity of the mob and the silliness of his culture, but he couldn’t. 

His talent and genius would not allow for retreat.  He embraced his resistance to pain, and held fast to his love of the common man, who knew not what he did.  He saw them misled by pastors from the pulpit, the cruel press, and by the Establishment who knew well what they were doing. 

The balance of his life was to search for ten righteous honest men.  He addressed common man in his syntax and idiom in an attempt to rescue him from the coterie of the cultivated so he could at least say “yes” or “no,” “Either” or “Or” to the reality of his choices.  His ideas congealed into angst.  He writes:

“How few are they who understand the common man and understand the extent to which contact with him is usually based upon the hardheartedness and cruelty of class distinction and respectability.  Then to have this contact denied me, to have it regarded as a ridiculous exaggeration, so that I can no longer do anything for the common man, because I exist for him as a sort of half-mad figure.”

*     *     *

As the reader follows this journey with me in delineating Kierkegaard’s true greatness, I encourage that same reader to reflect on how outside forces steer one away from the inner authentic self, how obsession with race, religion, politics, class and economics are used to drive stakes into the ground to enclose one in a cage, a cage, which has little to do with choice but more to do with a failure to embrace pain, and soar above self-imprisonment.

.

Remember the words of Shakespeare:

“And this above all unto thine own self be true and it shall follow as the day the night thous canst be false to any man.”

*     *     *