Ep. 224: Kierkegaard Critiques the Present Age (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for living but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 224 is something like what the hell is wrong with our society? Or what's the relationship between society and the individual? And we read Soren Kierkegaard's 1846 essay the Present Age plus Hubert Dreyfus's 2004 essay Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity versus Commitment in the Present Age. For more information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in a sort of slouching semi somnolent non cessation in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:37 Wes: This is Wes Alwan chattering passionately in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:42 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey strolling through town wearing a 30 foot visor in Midland, Michigan.

0:47 John: This is John Ganz flaring up in superficial short lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence. So more exciting.

0:54 Mark: John, welcome.

0:55 Seth: Welcome John.

0:56 John: Yeah, it's so exciting to be here. I've listened to your podcast for a very long time and yeah, it's a thrill to be on the show.

1:02 Mark: So you suggested this topic and we put you up for like a year plus. Tell us a little about what your background is and why you suggested this.

1:12 John: I'm a writer. I write mostly about politics. I write about the far right in the United States and kind of historical perspective. And as a writer I obviously have a belief in the public sphere and freedom of the press to contribute to a freer and better society. But I also have to admit I have some ambivalence and skepticism about that prospect as well, especially from spending a lot of time on social media as one does when one writes about politics these days, I guess. And I thought that this text, which I read a long time ago and then reread as I wrote more and spent more time in social media, really articulated, articulated a lot of those feelings of ambivalence that there was something disturbing going on in our media environment.

And I thought, you know, the Dreyfus text alongside of it articulates how this text applies to the present in some ways. But in some ways is I think kind of more dated than the Kierkegaard text. Interestingly enough, I think that there's something more contemporary about Kierkegaard than the Dreyfus.

2:15 Mark: The full book is called Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review and it is actually a book length review of a short Novel called Two Ages.

2:27 Wes: It's longer than the novel. Yes.

2:29 Mark: He keeps referring to the author because it was an anonymous author. And so he says the author of A Story of Everyday Life. So A Story of Everyday Life was an earlier book by this same anonymous author. Her book was actually called Two Ages. Her name was Thomasine Gyllembourg. She did read his review and was very flattered that he wrote this very long thing about it.

2:52 John: I think she was flattered and a little puzzled and amused. I think that he kind of took it and ran with it. And there's more Kierkegaard than there is an exposition of her own book. She herself had a very interesting life. I mean, I don't think he was aware he knew her son, and I don't think he was fully aware that it was this guy's mother who wrote this. But she had a very bohemian and unconventional life for that time. In Denmark. She married very young to a kind of radical Republican who was exiled for agitating against the monarchy in Denmark.

And he had to go into exile to revolutionary France. She divorced him because she didn't feel like waiting for him, and married another sort of radical. Several years later, he died. And then she lived with her son where they had a very fashionable literary salon in Copenhagen. And I think Kierkegaard looked up to her son as somebody in the literary world that he actually admired, which was uncommon because he basically looked down on most of his contemporaries. They, I think, were flattered by this review, but thought he was, you know, a very eccentric person and thought this was.

Was a little strange. But they published it in their journal. Another part of the context, which I think is interesting, is that this was written directly after an experience Kierkegaard had called the Corsair Affair, where there was a newspaper in Copenhagen called the Corsair, which was a scurrilous gossip rag, but it was widely read at a liberal perspective, and it went about attacking prominent people of the day is a little like Gawker, I think the impression that I get reading about it. It was read by everybody, but nobody liked to admit it.

And it was often written anonymously because you could get in serious trouble, have your career derailed if people know you wrote for the Corsair. So a book of his was badly reviewed. He knew who it was. Kierkegaard attacked the Corsair, outed the writer, and then he dared the Corsair to attack him in public. And they did. And for a period of several months they ran satires of him, including ridiculous cartoons of him. And he was recognized in the street from the cartoons and chased by young kids and harassed. He later said it was the best thing he did in his life because it was a period of spiritual education and so on and so forth.

But if you read his journals, it was extremely painful for him because he was isolated and harassed and mobbed and made fun of. And I don't think that would be fun for anybody. But reading his journal entries about it, even though I'm a big fan and I sympathize with this situation sometimes I have to admit that his self pity about it is unattractive. But some of his bitterness or what he learned from that experience is definitely in this review and in his reflections on the public as a mob. What the meaning of the press is. That experience comes through in how he reviewed this book very clearly.

5:50 Seth: When I was reading it, especially when I read the Dreyfus, I thought that the focus just on the press felt narrow to me given what my takeaway was from the end of my initial reading. So it was educational to kind of learn about that. But I kept thinking about the concept of enlightenment and reason and the expansion of reason into the public sphere. And I went back and listened to our episode 200 again about Mendelssohn, Kant and Foucault. And it feels like Kierkegaard is giving a diagnosis of the failure of enlightenment in some respects. And that's the theme I'm hoping we'll get a chance to explore a little bit today.

6:27 Dylan: At the beginning. He starts out diagnosing this present age as a sensible reflecting age, devoid of passion flaring up and superficial short lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence. And goes on from there to articulate more what he means by these problems of the reflective age, the leveling and the press. And ultimately there's this notion of the danger of abstraction, which is the part that I think that is what is pointed to by this notion of reflection that you kind of get tied up into a lack of particularity and fetishize abstraction that is sort of the underpinning of the problems that he sees.

I like the way Seth put it of it being a kind of diagnosis of the problem of enlightenment. I'm wondering a lot about how much of it is him cherry picking ways of looking at the present age and picking the problems of it, and how much of it is actually a problem, say of abstraction, or if it's some other kind of convention, a problem that has been true all along. So when I read these kinds of criticisms of modern technology, be it the Internet, or be it Kierkegaard's writing or public life or Socrates in Writing and the Phaedrus. I feel like I'm just running into a grumpy old man syndrome where people are saying, well, people aren't very engaged in their lives and they're not living a full life.

And that's because of X about modern society. And I find myself having more and more as I become a grumpy old man, a knee jerk, negative response and thinking, you're just being an ass. And on this, I don't mean to be so judgmental, but I mean in the sense of just a kind of grumpiness about it that isn't really particular to the age. To be more careful about it is that it's something about who we are and how we articulate ourselves and what it means to be a full human being. And so I think that at its bottom, that's what Kierkegaard is complaining about.

I think you see in this piece what Kierkegaard thinks a real, fully flourishing human being looks like. And that's the part that'd be interesting to pull out of it.

8:45 Wes: I share Dylan's sentiment. I always wonder how much of these sorts of critiques of age are applicable to the age, or they're getting at something universal, which because we're stuck in a given age, we don't necessarily recognize it as such. So for instance, when we read Thoreau, he talks about the telegram and you could substitute Twitter for telegram and it would be completely recognizable to us and the ways in which that fragments consciousness. And then Thoreau was also running into town every day from his cabin to get a newspaper. I don't know if it is much for you guys, but it's such a personal struggle for me with the news and how much to be engaged in politics and especially a medium like Twitter.

Part of what seems quaint about Dreyfus is the reference to blogs, as if those exist anymore. They lasted a few years and now are sort of like paragons of substance. You know, I remember the good old days of blogs. And in general, my impression is that the things that seem to be important in news and politics are really unimportant and toxic. And one must really create some sort of barrier between oneself and the press. And if that's sort of the life spirit of the public, then with that sort of public life as well, there's a lot of things I'm not clear about.

I mean, we'll have to talk about Inwardness and how that grounds a more significant form of relatedness. It's unclear to me what the role of religion is. If he's saying that religiousness is the only way through this, once we've gotten to this stage civilizationally, if the only way back to passion is through religion, it's unclear to me if he thinks there can be some sort of grounding of identity in civic life. Is he talking about something like Sandel's thick identities when he talks about passionateness? Is he giving one of these calls for a return to community and things like that?

And those sorts of things I'm less sympathetic with because I think it's just sort of a perennial human complaint, the feeling of being disconnected. And I'm sure it must be worse as our technologies become more advanced and more fragmenting, but I'm not sure how much. I'm not sure if it's really a difference in kind and not something that's more universal.

11:03 Mark: So just to clarify, the two ages are the age of revolution and the reflective age. And so, of course, for him, the age of revolution he might be thinking of within his lifetime.

11:14 John: It was the French Revolution.

11:15 Mark: Yes, the French Revolution. And you were just saying, John, about the people involved whose book he's writing about living through this and being directly affected by this. So it might seem strange that the two ages in question are so close together chronologically, and we now. And Dreyfus, Even though he's 10 years earlier than we are, and actually that was the second edition, so I guess the first edition was when the web was barely born. Google, he says, was just a doctoral thesis at that time. He had to update it. And he didn't even update the whole book.

So, I mean, it's super out of date. And already, since that seems out of date to us, like, how could we possibly be in the same age now as Kierkegaard's reflective age? And so this is kind of a question as we go forward. I kind of think of it in terms of this, the end of history thing that Fukuyama came up with. The idea that, yeah, we kind of think maybe Trumpism has shaken this faith, but that at least in the Western world, or at least where we are, nothing really revolutionary can happen. That we've kind of settled into something where capitalism is running things and there are technological forces pushing forward, but ultimately the kind of barbarous change that is symbolized by actual revolution, like, that can't happen to us.

And so even though, of course, there have been World War I and World War II and all these things between the Russian Revolution between us and Kierkegaard's time, I think we can definitely draw parallels. And then Dreyfus is just really ready to jump in and say the things that made Kierkegaard's objection to his age. The things that characterize that objection are even more present to us now. And so that's something that's open to discussion. Dreyfus. One thing that his article does do well is it gives a little historical background in terms of the kind of thing that he was objecting to.

And I think Seth's connecting this to. So that was like 1790, something where Kant and Mendelssohn and those were writing about the Age of Enlightenment. And what Kierkegaard is complaining about, as Dreyfus points out, is exactly that kind of democratization, that Enlightenment, that everybody can have an opinion, everybody's opinion matters, that Kant and his contemporaries were kind of ambivalent about. They were basically rejoicing, but they're also worried about. Kierkegaard is expressing frustration with that same thing. And we can project that forward into the present day.

13:30 John: Yeah, I think it's good to keep in mind that just two years after this was published, there was another wave of revolutions in Europe. So it seemed very staid and conformist in his time, but it changed very quickly. I think Seth's point about this being a critique of Enlightenment is exactly right. I think that Kierkegaard's real foil all the time was Hegel. And the key category of this text is reflection. And Hegel thought that modernity was an age of reflection. It was defined by abstract thought, the search for reasons and categorization. That critique of reflection, which Hegel thought just was a process that would eventually liberate mankind from tradition and customs, is a direct response to Hegel and to the Enlightenment.

14:19 Dylan: Interestingly, though, Dreyfus points this out too. Kierkegaard's book isn't thumping on. We need to return to tradition. We need to go back to any number of other things. Even religiosity, which he points to, whatever he means by religion or religiosity isn't organized. Religion isn't some kind of authority. That needs to be. At best, it's a kind of cultural authority. But that would be at the service of the flourishing of some kind of individual. He's not looking backwards, even though he's critiquing the present age. It's a critique born out of it being sort of vacuous without substance. And I haven't Read enough Kierkegaard to know, but I feel like he'd be leveling that same accusation and at the more sedimented characteristics of his present age in terms of the authority of the church and the authority of the monarchy and stuff like that.

15:16 John: Yeah, I think that's right. This is not a reactionary, traditionalist text. He believes that what has occurred, there is no undoing, and in fact, there's something positive about it. It has revealed humanity in its essence in a certain way by stripping away the bonds of community and so on and so forth. He thinks that there's a possibility here for the type of religiosity or commitment that he thinks is the most truly human. What that is is sometimes unclear. His definition of what religiosity is is idiosyncratic. And I think that Dreyfus tries to secularize it and say, well, it just means committing to something and really meaning it to the point where, you know, you would die for it.

I wonder if that kind of strips out too much content out of it. I think that, you know, Kierkegaard was a sincere Christian. He didn't just think it was about this sort of formal existential commitment. He thought there was some content there. It is difficult to know what he means by religiosity, and I think that that is by design, in a certain way, because I think that his focus on individuality and the importance of individuality means that that question can only be settled for yourself. And that is not something that he, as a writer can feed to you as a reader.

16:33 Seth: In the optional paper, the Dreyfus Rubin paper that you posted, Mark Kierkegaard's diagnosis, He has a whole mechanism for how this takes place, and we can get into that. But essentially what's critical is that the present age doesn't give human beings a measure to judge one thing as more important than another. In other words, everything is as important as everything else. That's part of it. The other part of it is everybody has an opinion about everything, even if they're not committed and informed. The difference between Kierkegaard and, say, Burke is that the answer to giving people something that has importance or valuing something over something else is not a return to tradition.

The conservative or reactionary response to this would be, yeah, we've lost the notion of the family, and we've lost God, and we've lost our connection to the land or, you know, whatever. Pick your favorite theme, which is how fascism gets cashed out. When you talk about revival of the nation and the blood and these sorts of things. That's not Kierkegaard's solution. He's not looking for a return to something. What he's trying to do is say there needs to be a way in which the individual can actually value something and commit to it personally.

Then we get into the danger of authenticity and all those other sorts of things. But I think in that way, Dylan, that's how you might differentiate his response in some sense to a traditionalist like Burke.

17:53 John: Yeah.

17:53 Dylan: On page 74 at the bottom, let's talk about our present age as an age without passion. It has no assets of feeling in the erotic, no assets of enthusiasm and inwardness in politics and religion, no assets of domesticity, piety and appreciation in daily life and social life. And he goes on and says, but an age without passion possesses no assets. Everything becomes, as it were, transactions and paper money. So he goes on to talk about money there, but to me he's really saying that the problem with the present age here is that nothing costs anything. And that is one sign of the paucity of our individuality. And that's one sign that everything equals everything else. That there's no genuine individuality, that the power of abstraction is that nothing costs anything.

18:41 Seth: You mean nothing's at stake?

18:42 Dylan: Nothing's at stake. Doesn't cost you anything to commit to anything, because in the end you can just change your mind.

18:47 John: Yeah.

18:48 Mark: So let's connect. Dreyfus draws this connection, saying especially the Internet, more so even than what Kierkegaard is talking about. You can browse around and there's no stakes. You can participate on discussion boards. I mean, he's writing before there's social media, which presumably has your real name and reputation attached to it, or, you know, doing things like this podcast where we're kind of putting ourselves out there reputationally. He's focusing on the anonymous and casual aspect of the Internet. So you can see how it seems like that's a very low stakes environment.

Right. You can go on Second Life, you can go on whatever board and post things anonymously, try out new ways of being, new kinds of relationships, and maybe you're building skills. He's skeptical of that. But in any case, there's no real risk. Now let's connect that up to the beginning of this text here. So the present age, it's essentially a sensible reflecting age, devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial short lived enthusiasm and prudently relaxing in indolence. So sitting behind your computer or reading your newspaper, engaging in gossip, that sounds like kind of lazy, uncommitted thing.

But there are parts of this actually calling that a reflecting age. The problem with the Internet is that people self reflect too much. Like that does not seem to capture the usual ways that Internet behavior or something is criticized. Now, can we get a little more into his words here in the opening sections on why we are prudential, why we are too reflective.

20:19 John: I think one way where you can connect. I know it seems strange to say people are too reflective these days because we think of it as a time thoughtless in a certain way, people are impulsive. But I think if you look at the way people's political identities shift very quickly, the way that they go from being one political extreme to the other in a series of few days, and they have these strong identifications. One day they're a Leninist, another day they're this and that. You see these transformations happening on social media and you see them happening in message boards where people take on these bizarre political identities, where they mix and match some ancient idea with some modern idea, and there's just this constant churn.

And I think that what that reflects. It's hard to get away from using that word so much, is that people are constantly able to reflect and distance themselves from action and reconfigure their identity. If they read something that sounds compelling, they say, oh, no, now I'm this. Or oh, no, now I'm that. That seems to happen in a kind of thoughtless way. And I think Kierkegaard would agree. Kibson. And it's not deep or profound thought, but it comes from the ability to abstract from one's concrete situation and to take on, to reflect and to take on a new identity.

So I think in that sense it works another way you could apply. This is just every social problem that comes up, there are dozens of different takes on it. But then something happens in the world. And some people say, okay, well, this is because of mental health. Other people say this is a political issue. There just becomes this morass or web of possible perspectives which never really seems to go all the way down. You could spend all your time reflecting on a different issue from different points of view. You can say, okay, well, this has a psychological dimension, it has a historical dimension, a political dimension.

And people on the Internet engage in these discussions, and they don't really seem to have any purpose except to perpetuate the process of reflection.

22:26 Wes: So it seems like the reflective part of this, it doesn't imply any sort of depth. One way of looking at it may be just to say that it happens in the realm of fantasy. Right. So for most people who are, or as Kierkegaard will talk later on about spectators, it happens in this mode of spectation. If you're involved in news consumption, let's say, or Twitter or even blogs, if they're still out there, you're talking about the stuff, you're probably not doing anything about it. And you may, you know, he talks about these flare ups of enthusiasm. You may work yourself up into a rage, you get really angry and passionate about stuff, but that never leads to action.

23:09 Dylan: It's the reflection of the freshman in your dorm room.

23:11 Wes: Yeah. And in many cases it's not possible for it to lead to action. The things that are upsetting are usually these big larger political forces. And you can say, yeah, I'm going to go out and vote, or I'm going to be an activist of some sort in many cases. I think that something very particular today is that people feel like they're engaging in action when they express their opinion. Because often it's now in the context of trying to ruin someone, trying to ruin their reputation or get them fired. I'm thinking of the most extreme form now. But the Twitter mob phenomenon is one where I think people think, yes, simply by expressing an opinion and amplifying the Borg opinion that they see as the right one, they can have influence.

And I think there's actually something to that. Culturally we have shifted and I think the Internet does play some part in that. But just back to my main point is that I think that the fact that all of this happens at the level of fantasy and talk, maybe even collective fantasy rather than action, really captures the reflective part of this.

24:17 Dylan: How does that drive with the gossipy nature? And maybe it's that this over reflection of spectatorship that everything becomes kind of gossip. But there's a superficiality that's being discussed where it sounds like the category of Us magazine or whatever, being consumed by celebrities and cat videos or whatever. There's that kind of superficiality. And then there's this, what we were just talking about, which seems like a pinging back and forth with maybe a apparent passionateness that doesn't have any stakes, but seems like much more forceful. It doesn't seem like somebody who's flipping back and forth between a Leninist and being whatever the other pole of that

25:00 Seth: was, John is nobody is a Leninist.

25:03 Dylan: But it seems to be different to me than the gossipy pseudo public activity

25:08 Wes: that sounds like chatter. Like Kierkegaard's talk of chatter.

25:12 Seth: Dreyfus connects Kierkegaard and Heidegger. And Heidegger appropriates Kierkegaard's notion of chatter into something he calls Gerede, which in German, it's like idle talk. The issue there isn't. It's not about cat videos. Like, you know, that's the magic of the Internet. Amusing ourselves to death. That's avoidance. This is like where the five of us are here and we decide we're having a conversation about the latest drama. Oh, my God, can you believe the chairman of the EPA made you know, who didn't pay? Or whatever. And you get all wrapped up.

And we're talking about this when in fact we're not planning on actually doing anything about it. Like, we're not politically active. There's nothing at stake. This isn't like we're going to oust this person or file a complaint or something along those lines. It's essentially what the news media has become. If you turn on, and it doesn't matter which one, it can be msnbc, it can be cnn, it could be Fox News. They're not actually reporting news anymore. It's just a bunch of people sitting around talking about something that they've decided is important.

And there's a scroll bar underneath that's got more things that should wind you up. Then there's something that says breaking news, right? The same breaking news for three hours in a row. It's just chatter. But none of these people is actually doing anything about it. The question then becomes, who's actually got feet on the ground, who's got skin in the game, and who's actually out there trying to take action? In an age like this, this is where you find susceptibility to demagogues and to tyrants and so forth. Because these are people who are just willing to take action or have essentially cut through the chatter.

In that respect, I think the diagnosis is spot on.

26:51 Wes: This is on page 97 at the bottom. What is it to chatter? It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak, essentially can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it. This reminds me of the fact that I've tried to stop looking at my phone like, no news, no messaging. Because I realized that all those sort of in between times, whether it's like being in an Uber or walking or waiting in a waiting room, in many other circumstances, I was just filling up with self distraction.

I mean, it used to be the case I had to come home and get on my desktop computer in order to do that. And then we had the laptops. But at least you have to take that out and put that on your lap. And with the phone you can fill up every little space. Those are the spaces in which I think otherwise we are more likely to be reflective in a good sense or engage in this inwardness that Kierkegaard is talking about. The other place I thought was informative about what he means by chatter. He says chattering dreads the moments of silence. And then he says on page 100, suppose a law were passed and could be maintained that did not forbid people to speak, but merely ordered that everything spoken about had to be spoken about as if it had happened 50 years ago.

Then all the chatterers would be sunk. They would despair. But those persons who are genuinely able to speak would. Would not be disturbed. Essentially this is something I thought about because it's interesting how different it is to be engaged with the news, right? And to be reading a history book. We don't read about Caesar going into a town and massacring all of its inhabitants. And that, you know, stand up in an outrage at the injustice. And it's sad, it's horrifying, and one may draw some lesson about man's humanity to man. We have a much different relation to what's current.

So I think part of the chatter element is a kind of currentness which allows us to be identified in a certain way that we can't identify. And it's a facile, easy identification. It's not just that something sad and immoral has happened, but in some sense we've been slighted. And then we can relish in the fantasy that that slight is going to be corrected. So I think it's related to Nietzsche, an unconscious revenge fantasy and some sense of being slighted. The difference between being engaged with something in the present, where maybe slighted is the wrong way to say it, but we have some.

We have a much different relationship with that than we would with, Kierkegaard says, is something with history, something that's in the past, where we can't get worked up in the same way.

29:47 John: The reason why I feel like this text feels so much more up to date than the Dreyfus text is because Dreyfus is. Perspective is basically the problem with the Internet is that it puts people into this fantasy realm where there's no consequences, it's just all pure nothing. And that's Bad on an existential level because it distances people from real life. But I think what Kierkegaard gets at is that there is the sections on Envy where he says the correlative reflection is this spreading envy, where everyone seeks to kind of tear everyone down. And if you see the way people relate to on the Internet, that's absolutely true. The passages on Envy, which I'll find are just astonishingly contemporary. Page 83 and 84.

30:29 Wes: Well, in 81 he tells us it's the negatively unifying principle in a passionless and very reflective age.

30:35 John: I find this very compelling. But what I've never been able quite to figure out is the conceptual hinge between envy and reflection. But I think it exists because there's something. This is like the center of the phenomenology of contemporary life that he's providing here, that something about this reflective capacity we have is feeding the awful behavior of mobs and conformity and so on and so forth. These are two sides of it. And he kind of just says it and doesn't quite give the full hinge. But if you guys have thoughts on that, I would be very interested to hear it.

But this is, I think just a wonderful passage. But the more reflection becomes dominant and develops indolence, the more dangerous envy becomes, because it no longer has the character to come to self awareness of its own significance. Lacking that character, it relates to events in equivocating cowardice and vacillation, and reinterprets the same thing in all sorts of ways, wants it to be taken as a joke. And then when that apparently miscarries wants it to be taken as an insult. And if that miscarries claims that nothing was meant at all, that is supposed to be a witticism.

And if that miscarries explains that it was not meant to be that either, that it was ethical satire, which in fact ought to be of some concern to people. And if that miscarries says that it is nothing anyone should pay attention to, that is such an exact description of a social media post where people say like, what's going on here? Then the person goes, well, actually I'm being ironic. And they're like, no, you're not being ironic. And they go, well, you know, it's just a shitpost, man. Like it doesn't really mean anything. There's this constant ability to distance yourself from your utterances and you just say, well, you know, if someone objects to what you're saying, you just say, I'm being ironic.

Or actually this is a satire. If you're smart enough to get it. And then you just say, well, it's just something I said on the Internet, so don't even get worked up about it anyway, man. So there's just this ability to constantly slink away.

32:33 Wes: I think psychologically the. Because I don't think we get a good definition of envy. Even though he. On page 84, he tells us what envy does. So on page 84, for instance, envy in the process of establishing itself takes the form of leveling. And whereas a passionate age accelerates, raises up and overthrows, elevates and debases a reflective, apathetic age does the opposite. It stifles and impedes it levels. I had to think about the psychology of envy in order to try and figure out how those things are connected. And at a basic level, it's just the desire that others have things that we want. You know, if someone has something that we want and then envy is the desire that they not have it. It's not just I want it, it's I wish they didn't have it.

33:20 Dylan: Both of those. Right. That's where the leveling comes in.

33:22 Wes: And its purest form, anything that produces passion in us, anything that's so good and so important that we have to stand in that sort of relation to it, that it itself not exist. It's not just that. This is my abstract speculation now. So it's not just about someone else not having it. Envy can reach the point where you want the good thing to simply not be out there. If it's not inside me already, if I'm not self satisfied and self sufficient in some way, I just wish it weren't out there at all. And so in order to kind of reduce my passion and the sense of tension that creates envy, I think is a leveling or there are leveling strategies related to envy. Some of it's just cynicism. Right. You advance the idea that there's just nothing. Is that important?

34:09 Dylan: I wondered where the notion and understanding of envy is wanting to have the thing yourself so as to make yourself distinguish yourself. Got lost. Because I've usually thought of that as part of envy is that wanting to have that thing and have that distinction as well. But the way we're talking about it is more primarily driving towards at least the backup strategy as to if I can't have it for myself and have that distinction, then I don't want anybody else to have it.

34:38 Wes: Yeah, I think that's the more important thing. Because if it were just a matter of wanting it, you could think of that as longing. And I think the longing is the thing that's being defended against here. Envy is more aggressive. It's not, oh, there's good things out there and I want them. I have longing for them. It's the fantasy that one has been slighted or hurt not by the longing per se, but the fact that others enjoy them. And if I could stop others from enjoying such things, I may still be in a state of longing. It may suck, but it's not as bad. My envy would be satisfied if no one could enjoy the thing that I wanted in the whole world. I don't think there could be a reason for envy.

35:19 John: I think it may help to think that envy comes second. He's not saying that human psychology of envy leads to leveling. He's saying the leveling is primary. I think what he's describing is that this kind of crabs in a bucket effect of leveling, that the way people think about and relate to things is always about dragging down and leveling out. So envy as a phenomenon is not what's driving leveling. I think it is a consequence of living in a leveling age. I don't know if that clarifies it, but I think it's just not that to say, like, oh, well, what is the actual human psychology of leveling? He said there's a particular type of envy, I think, that manifests itself in this age of reflection.

36:03 Mark: Yeah. I want to tie this back to earlier in the text, how he introduces leveling and then envy comes out of that. That it's not that he's giving a Nietzschean ressentiment. You know, you can definitely draw comparisons to that. And you can say, where does this supposed prudence that we then use to scold or look down on everybody who does something really impressive? I think we have to keep in mind that this envy is about virtues in particular, is about great deeds, it's about greatness, not necessarily about envying someone for their social station or having a nice car or something like that.

I think about when people watch the Olympics, if you were living in an ancient age, you just say, wow, that is really impressive what those people are doing. I can only be inspired to work hard and be like that. And he thinks that the modern view on this would be much more like, yeah, I could do that if I worked hard. God, what kind of life do you have to live to, like, work that hard? And so he gives this example on 71 through 72. If a treasure everyone covets lies very far out on a thin crust of ice guarded by the great danger to anyone venturing so far out, Whereas closer to the shore the ice is thick and solid.

In a passionate age, the crowd would loudly cheer the bold, brave person who skates in the thin ice. They would shudder for him and with his perilous decision would grieve for him if he meets his death. I would idealize him if he gets the treasure. The situation would be entirely different. In a reflective age, devoid of passion, in mutual recognition of shared prudence, they would sensibly agree that certainly would be not worth the trouble to skate on such thin ice. In fact, it would be foolish and ridiculous. Then an inspired venture would be transformed into an acrobatic stunt.

37:39 John: It's just a matter of constantly taking the grade down of something. Just be like, eh, what's the big deal about that? Or just putting things in a light that makes them less impressive and never allowing these things to actually have some sort of spiritual meaning for people, but rather just making sure that there's a snide remark to take everything down a peg. I mean, we all do that. We all see somebody admiring something and we think it's kind of BS and you make a sarcastic remark and. And it's fun in a way to knock things down at peg in that while.

And this is what Kierkegaard would talk about, people flatter themselves that they're even doing something important by doing that. Obscuring the idols of the age by preventing people from overly admiring silly things. So yeah, I think that this is a little bit different from the type of envy we talk about when we talk about envying somebody else's possession or a loved one or something like that. It's an envy of spiritual experience, a constant need to shit on other people's joy in life.

38:44 Dylan: There's a great line at the end of the paragraph Mark was reading. In short, instead of being stimulated to being discriminating and encouraged to do the good by this festival of admiration, the celebrators would rather go home, more disposed than ever to the most dangerous but also the most aristocratic of all diseases to admire socially what one personally regards as trivial. Because the whole thing has become a theatrical joke and the spirit toasts of admiration that become the secret understanding that they could almost just as well be admiring themselves.

39:15 Wes: I don't recognize this as a typical pattern of behavior, in all honesty, with

39:21 John: people, I think people make a big fuss about things and sort of pretend that they are excited about stuff, but have an inward reserve that it's just not that important. But they're kind of doing it because that's what one does. I think that that happens all the time.

39:36 Wes: I don't know. In my experience, people are quite passionate about something and that is an organizing principle in their lives.

39:43 Dylan: One distinction that came to me in this regard was the distinction of the kind of spectatorship that what I just read referred to, where Mark characterized it as, you watch the Olympics and you're like, ah, well, you know, I could do that if I just worked hard enough. And you sort of disregard the excellence that's there and you level it by making it. It's just a question of your superior choice kind of thing. The distinction between that kind of activity and being a fan, where you have somebody who is not watching it disinterestedly, but in fact injecting themselves into it and participating it in a certain way where they're not performing in the play, but they are invested in it in a very similar way.

And they are manifesting that investment by their own dedication, their own bringing in that activity to themselves. And so they're kind of living vicariously through it. In fact, far from pushing it away from themselves as spectators, they're actually pulling it inside themselves and defining themselves in that way.

40:46 Wes: This is exactly what I was trying to get at, Dylan. And I think people are inspired by it. So it's not necessarily like, oh, yeah, I want to become a pole vaulter, or pole vaulting is the most important thing to me. But it's. I want to be that good at something. I think people often are engaged in that kind of identification. I'm not saying I'm right about. Because I think these sorts of generalizations are hard to make. I'm trying to figure out whether I think that this sort of characterization works either. I don't know for Kierkegaard's age, but for our age, because it seems somewhat foreign to me.

41:20 Seth: One way you might characterize this is thinking in terms of sports. So you were talking about fandom, right? What's happened with professional sporting teams in the United States is they've started to build new stadiums with giant skyboxes and entertainment and food service and all these things. The sport itself, the idea of Dylan, what you're talking about, a fan who. The fans who've invest themselves in the experience that's actually playing out on the field are priced out of the stadium. But more importantly, what happens is it becomes an event that's just.

It's like a social happening. So it's not about the game anymore. It's like, oh man, I got to go to the skybox. And we drank beer and we ate food and how was the game? Oh, you know, I don't know. It was really. It's this idea that we're not engaged, nothing is at stake. But there's so many threads here talking about leveling and this notion of the public, which is the abstraction, you know, Dylan, maybe this is the time we can kind of bring that into the conversation. It reminds me of Fukuyama too, where it's not just that people are choosing to not recognize excellence, it's that leveling means there's a prohibition against excellence.

You're not allowed to be excellent. We're not allowed to acknowledge that people are different and that they have different capabilities and so forth, because that would mean putting you in a position where you are not in a position to speak knowledgeably about something.

42:46 Wes: I just see us as a very status oriented meritocratic society where that kind of stuff is actually encouraged.

42:52 Dylan: I don't want to deny that there's this notion of leveling going on that maybe is associated with envy, as we were interpreting earlier. But I think that there's at least as strong of a thread of Way west put it was sort of meritocracy of trying to distinguish oneself based upon status. That's going along as well. I want to lay alongside this leveling notion, this constant desire for status that I see going on as well.

43:20 John: I think Kierkegaard would have a response to that. I think on page 85, if 10 persons could agree to affirm the full and unqualified validity of erotic love with no clipping considerations, the limited justification, justification of enthusiasm, it would not there follow that each of the 10 would be able to do it, for they would still ambivalently love reflections judgment even more than the rapture of love and the witnessing of enthusiasm with their spirit. So I think desire for status could be described as this longing for reflections judgment.

So longing for the temporary applause of the crowd is different from substantial commitment. I think that a lot of people are driven to all sorts of things, but it's basically to feel the momentary adulation of public opinion rather than their investment in this passionate commitment. And in order to consistently feel reflections judgment, they will abandon commitments right and left and pursue new projects in order to continually do that, to do all sorts of stunts and so on and so forth.

44:24 Mark: What I'm hearing overall is kind of a yay Nietzsche, boo Kierkegaard in terms of his analysis of what leveling amounts to. That Nietzsche's analysis would be it's the slave revolt. It's people who are rated low on the current system trying to upend that system to raise themselves higher. Whereas I think Kierkegaard has a more straightforward analysis that says in the olden days there were great men, there were great deeds, and we now live in an age that just denies the existence of those things. Not out of any pernicious desire for the low rated individuals to raise their station to become those great people, but just to deny that greatness exists.

That's where we are. And that comes out of the democratic sentiment. Right. You can't have the idea that everyone is special. So there just must be no such thing. If you believe everybody is equal, there just must be no such thing as being special. So I'm not sure how to adjudicate between those two things.

45:22 John: I think that the moral psychology of Nietzsche is a lot less interesting in a way because it just assumes that, you know, they're these sort of lesser beings running around trying to spoil it for the great people. When I think what Kierkegaard describes as actually something has taken over our cultural infrastructure, the whole entire phenomenology of being a human being that leads to these things. And it is not the result of lesser beings, it's the result of a huge historical change and it has extreme costs. There are things that are lost and he thinks that there are also there's a possibility of gain.

So I would say Kierkegaard's picture both seems more morally acceptable to me and also just more correct. I think that usually people who go on about that they're the übermensch and everyone else is trying to pull them down are laughable. And I think the Kierkegaard would say everybody has moments where they're involved in these mobs and everybody has moments where they can kind of liberate themselves from it.

46:23 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think what's at stake psychologically though is the role to which envy or ressentiment or some other negative. Not just about little people. And you could be an elitist about those sorts of things, but you don't have to be. So to what extent those sorts of negative psychological states play a role? Or is it. Are we giving a more cultural. Is it just the age cultural influence or is it a fundamental psychological state at all? Is it envy or is it just something else entirely? Maybe something that doesn't even have a negative connotation in that sense? You know, my intuitions run more with Nietzsche so far, but that's only Because I don't really. Although I thought a little bit of Nietzsche while reading Kierkegaard. I don't feel like I grasp his moral psychology yet. Definitely.