KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- SEVEN

 KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN --SEVEN

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

© June 2, 2012

You get a sense of how young the United States is when you realize you have lived one-third of its existence.  In that short time, America has been dominant more than a century.  Few societies have risen so quietly to explode so violently and reach global significance so quickly.  It was, and is a formula that would inevitably be copied.

As Niall Ferguson points out in his “Civilization of the West and the Rest” (2012), America’s influence extends from dress (bluejeans) to music (Rock & Roll) as well as economically and technologically to be nearly totally intrusive to the rest of the world. 

By the accident of those born in the 1930s, they have witnessed this theatre of the absurd.   I have attempted to chronicle this absurdity in a series of books, articles and missives on these pages over the last quarter century. 

Niall Ferguson uses the information age jargon of "aps" to point out the power and cultural shift from the West to the East.  My objective is more modest.  I chronicle America’s senseless retreat from its roots into complacency, senseless consumption, shameless indolence, reckless hubris, leaderless leadership and a hysterical mania for conformity. 

The American work ethic, still the best in the world, is only a shadow of it once was.  We have faded from Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1834).   

This is the reason I have offered this series of essays on Soren Kierkegaard, who knew the price of cultural retreat a century and one half ago in his native Denmark.

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REALITY: TRIAL BY FIRE

Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) in his short life was such a prolific author of pseudonymous works, edifying writing, and journals that contemporaries couldn’t keep abreast of this avalanche.  People were impressed or irritated at once, and felt little discomfort or need to change.  Most ignored what he said, and weren’t around when the wisdom of his thought came to influence Western Civilization from Europe to the United States, giving birth to philosophers, writers, politicians and the common man. 

What is ignored cannot be forgotten because reality is always a trial by fire.

Kierkegaard didn’t split hairs between what was legal and ethical but instead insisted that ethics was the individual’s responsibility and primary task in life.  We have made what is ethical and legal synonymous, but at our peril. 

Perhaps he had a premonition he would have a short life.  In any case, solitude and silence was the template used to discover the wisdom of the common man through an exploration of his own innermost self.  He knew those at the controls of his society were not the future, but the common people who tested the fire of reality on a daily basis. 

We think our times loaded with strive, but strive is relative and differs in character rather than content from one age to the next.  Kierkegaard understood this.  His secret was self-understanding, which was his guide to authentic man. 

He used satire as his weapon.  Satire, he understood, was the reverse of the emotional, but paradoxically, generated the more genuine feeling.  To speak negatively by attacking rather than praising a thing was his route to the positive. 

Put another way, what we say and choose to think might be precisely the opposite of what drives us to action.  Our motives are often a puzzle to us.  Feelings buried or disregarded find us immersed in what we would rather avoid.  Given this disposition, reality ultimately cuts us to the quick when we least expect it.  We can neither retreat from the concrete and the real, nor can we blame our circumstances on outside forces for very long until reality intervenes.

That said evidence of this inclination is found in what Kierkegaard coined “the public,” and Gustave Le Bon “the crowd,” and which is now manifested in the “Tea Party” and “Occupy Wall Street.”  

Kierkegaard did not see such movements leading to fellowship or harmony, but rather to discord, and a mania for the abstraction of “the public cause,” where ideas are diluted into unrealistic principles. 

He saw an army of journalists “deceiving the people, misleading and insulting the common man” by placating man’s revolutionary instincts with the ballot box.  It was not the ballot box, per se, but how it was used that infuriated him.  For this stand, many questioned his sincerity, including common people.  It didn’t help that he was inclined to be caustic and sarcastic.

Suspected of using the common man to conduct psychological experiments, which he was guilty of, he was nonetheless sincere, direct, and without ulterior motives.  When pressed, he claimed his pursuits were for the sake of everyman. 

Bold thinkers, and he surely was one, often are in trouble with dominant cultural institutions, even those they support.  Kierkegaard was a devout Christian but was at constant war with Christian self-deception.  He saw this in religious movements that swallowed up the individual with its norms so that the only identity allowed thereafter was that of the group.  He paid dearly for these Christian attacks. He writes in his defense:

“(In Copenhagen) I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric, with whom every damned one of us, from the highest aristocrats to guttersnipes, imagine we can have a bit of fun.  My work as an author, that enormous productivity, the intensity of which, it seems to me, could move stones, the individual segments of which not one living writer can compare with: the writing is regarded as a sort of hobby, like fishing and such.  Those who could produce something themselves envy me and remain silent.  And the others understand nothing.  I do not receive the support of a single word from reviews and the like.  I am plundered by small-time prophets in foolish lectures as religious meetings and the like.  But mention me by name?  No, that isn’t necessary.”

We ponder Kierkegaard's wisdom with a sense that identity and individualism is no less threatened today for the common man.

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