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On Soren Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age” (1846) and Hubert Dreyfus’s “Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age” (2004).
What’s wrong with our society? Kierkegaard saw the advent of the press and gossip culture as engendering a systematic passivity and shallowness in his fellows, and Dreyfus thinks this is an even more apt description of the Internet Age, where it’s easy to spout anonymous, not-well-thought-out opinions without risk or commitment.
Guest John Ganz joins Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan to explore and evaluate Kierkegaard’s claims. Is it correct to describe this age as “too reflective” as opposed to revolutionary ages when people actually got out of the house and did things, with their full commitment? Were things really better when people were less prudent, more prone to making “a big stupid blunder?” Is his dismissal of “chatter” as opposed to the inwardness of silence, really just another case of sexist Stoicism? Does it make sense for Kierkegaard himself, with his concern for his public reputation, his lack of commitment (especially in his love life), his hyper-reflectivity, and his logorrheic preachiness to be making this critique? Finally, does this critique really apply so well to the Internet, or just to particularly toxic parts of it?
“The Present Age” is actually the conclusion of Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age A Literary Review
Read some of John’s articles for The Baffler, Medium, or Brooklyn Rail.
Continues with part two; get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
Image by Solomon Grundy.
the social media and culture critic @jiatolentino has a new book of essays that she says is part of her trying to work thru what is the value of being well informed about issues that one has no meaningful say about (besides signaling tribal alliances on social media) and that have no obvious/existing fix and I think that she is right about this worry and that it is a genuinely new situation insomuch as our technological reaches/impacts now far exceed our abilities to govern ourselves (from pollution to finance we are impotent), here she is talking about the limits of explainer media with onetime blogger and explainer in chief Ezra Klein:
https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/jia-tolentino-on-what-happens-when-life-is-an-endless-performance
Thanks for the link – looks intriguing. Much agreed on the phenomenology. It’s amazing that people are still making this “nothing new under the sun” argument, and still more amazing that I have to root for their being right.
Bert strips Kierkegaard of God’s salvation/grace to leave us with the impression that being-resolute is the vital issue at hand, now first of all that would put us back in the ‘hands’ of various aspects of life that Kierkegaard found ultimately lacking (like aesthetics/culture, philosophizing, or citizenship) and it would do so in a way that strips away all of the concerns that one finds in Marxist diagnoses of alienation (material circumstances/processes, politics, economics, etc), so we end up with a kind of Heidegger-lite life hack model. A better post-Foucault route is that of Bert’s one-time colleague Paul Rabinow:
https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/paul-rabinow-foucault-and-contemporary