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

0:00 Mark: I'm hoping we can in the second half hit on some more specific topics that he gets into in the text. Given what you said, John, about what immediately prompted this, I feel like maybe some of the disconnect if we're thinking like, ah, this isn't describing what I observe in Internet mobs or something. It's because it almost seems very specific to the kind of wag he was responding to. Who would dare to criticize him in this Corsair? You know, he's saying, isn't that typical? Isn't that just like what the press does? We might just want to say, okay, well, he's characterizing a certain kind of attitude toward humor. And then we can muse on whether that is as widespread, you know, now or then as he seems to think it is.

0:41 John: He was made fun of and caricatured and cartoons were drawn of him and so on and so forth. Although, you know, that seems a little old fashioned. There is some continuity. You know, frequently when people come subject for public opprobrium, they will caricature them and send them horrible images of their face or get very dark. It wasn't just in the press, it spread to the entire society. So just he wasn't on social media getting bothered. He was walking around on the streets and getting bothered, which is scarier in many ways. I think there is a real continuity between the type of wit or parody that goes on and present tendency to sort of tease people and so on and so forth.

He's not anti humor because, I mean, he himself is an extremely funny. And he thinks that there is a deep spiritual value in humor. He thinks that there is a type of humor which has no ethical substance. There's a quote even here where he says satire is great, but it has to have some ethical worldview behind it. It can't just be the willy nilly tearing down and making fun of everything, because that will inflame the kind of spiritual despair that he sees happening.

1:54 Mark: Yeah, page 81. And we take pride in the fancy that this is irony, oblivious to the fact that in an era of negativity, the authentic ironist is the hidden enthusiast, self sacrificing for after all, that grandmaster of irony. So he's talking about Socrates, ended up being punished by death, that this is his model of, you know, how he does humor. Whereas he says wit, there's something that is Divine about it. Suppose that wit were changed to its most trite and hackneyed opposite. A trifling necessity of life. This is kind of my long standing objection a little bit to stand up comedy. I like humor that is reacting to something a little better than I'm just going to create it out of whole cloth and I have to do it night after night.

2:37 John: That's an interesting observation. I think he thinks there's something spontaneous and magical that happens with a joke or a wit because it reflects some kind of substantial realization about one's condition in life. That passage that you quoted about wit being a necessity of life is very much present in the way humor spreads. I mean, there's memes, there's jokes, and there are certain even inflections of voice that become popular or funny. These jokes spread across the Internet. They become exhausted very quickly, but their life lasts longer than their actual humor.

And they are not anybody's individual sense of humor. They are the kind of the public sense of humor. On Twitter, for example, anytime anybody's freaking out, inevitably someone will, quote, tweet them and say, this person is having a normal one. At first, I'm sure that was a funny joke. He'd say, like, this guy's having a. Like he's freaking out. And then the contrast is he's not actually having a normal day. But this has stopped being funny. But it has a life of its own. This kind of humor as a commodity, as something that circulates, or wit as a commodity, as witty remarks that you can learn and just recycle, you know, is at variance with what actual humor and wit is, which is a spontaneous reaction to a circumstance.

And then this becomes something that's just cliched and printed over and over again. There's a type of humor that's just people echoing what they've heard, jokes they've heard. And that is sort of not really. It's not funny. Whatever laugh you get out of it is from the recognition of having heard it before. Not that it actually has something incisive to say about what you're actually encountering. Does that sound plausible?

4:20 Dylan: It does, but it makes me want to talk a little bit more about the public in these abstract entities. So I'm thinking one of this notion that leveling is cultural, which is it's not the action of one individual, but a reflection game in the hand of an abstract power that's on page 84. And then the public is this kind of monstrous nonentity, which is on page 90. So he says, for leveling really to take place, a phantom must be raised, the spirit of leveling. A monstrous abstraction and all encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage. And this phantom is the public.

There is no such thing as a public. In spirited, passionate, tumultuous times, even when a people wants to actualize the idea of the barren desert destroying and demoralizing everything, the public is the actual master of leveling. For when there is approximate leveling, something is doing the leveling. But the public is a monstrous nonentity he brings up. Public is one, the press ends up being another. There's a bunch of these, I'll call them abstract entities, for which he points out how they don't have a head, they're non entities. And I wanted us to talk about how that differs from something that is also abstract.

But he would say has a kind of beingness like a community. So the public isn't a community. And at the bottom of 92 he says a generation, a nation, a general assembly, a community, a man still have a responsibility to be something, can show shame for fickleness and disloyalty, but a public remains the public. So he has this class of these non entities, these abstract entities that fall into this sort of nihilistic category. And then he has all these other categories I would understand is also abstract. A generation, a nation, maybe a general assembly is a little less abstract than that.

A community that are not nihilistic, they stand for something and the sign of them is that they can be destroyed or contradicted. But I wanted to understand more that difference that he's saying, is it actually a difference in kind or a difference

6:30 Wes: in degree between public and community?

6:34 Seth: For instance, I'm glad you brought up

6:36 Mark: that that term approximate leveling, because I think that the leveling itself, this is why I'm kind of objecting to a straight up psychological analysis of it, because I think kind of like in our society of the spectacle discussion, that by the time you get to full on leveling, it's systemic. It's not any individual doing it anymore. It's just memes echoing through the void and people. I think the comment about humor is very much like a specific case of Orwell's. We talked about his objection to just mouthing cliches. So if you're mouthing cliche jokes, it's not any different than mouthing other things that are just echoing back through your mouth.

But like it's not even your psychology other than maybe like, I don't want to rock the boat. There's nothing malicious coming in play from your psychology. It's just the way that society is operating in its spirit of conformity here. And approximate leveling is actually concrete groups. So he talks about like a clash of leaders that neutralizes both. These are actions that might get leveling underway. Like of course, you have to have, you know, for the system to have ossified and become self sustaining, there have to be fuel, there have to be individual human actions, intentional actions, maybe hostile actions, these brief flare ups of enthusiasm he talks about that get those going.

And so that's the approximate leveling which actually has as a causal agent, some individuals or groups from leveling per se, which is just autonomous.

8:04 Seth: So on page 91 at the beginning of the second full paragraph starts contemporaneity with actual persons, each of whom is someone in the actuality of the moment. And the actual situation gives support to the single individual. That's community. That's what community is. It's a contemporaneous group of actual individuals coming together. He says later on, you may have the opinion of the majority, you may have the opinion of the minority, but the majority and the minority in that community are actual persons. And what he says is the existence of the public creates no situation and no community.

After all, the single individual who reads is not a public. And then gradually many individuals read, perhaps all do. But there is no contemporaneity. The public may take a year and a day to assemble, and when it is assembled, it still does not exist. The abstraction that individuals paralogistically form alienates individuals instead of helping them. I think community is not an abstraction. Community is a collection of individuals. Community as a concept may be abstract, but the community itself is not an abstraction. It's grounded in the particular, in the actual individuals.

He's saying that the notion of public, a public is not all of the individuals aggregated together into one giant community. Instead, it's disconnected from the actuality of the individuals. And it's an abstraction which we then start to, you know, it's almost one of those things like substance, where we give it a name, we reify it by giving it a name, but it doesn't have a positive function in the sense that it describes something. Instead, it becomes almost like a bugbear or bugaboo or, you know, something like that.

9:44 Dylan: Well, what's interesting about it is that both of them have force. The distinction here being that community, we're saying, has some kind of positive force. It is an articulation of positive value, for lack of a better term. And the problem with the public is. It's a kind of emptiness. But in so being, an emptiness has an action. We wouldn't care about public if it actually did nothing. It's not that it doesn't do nothing. It's that it does something that we don't like. And that's the distinction I'm trying to suss out a little bit. Is that if it's a monstrous nonentity, how is it doing anything?

It seems like that's not quite right. I mean, if you want to call it a nonentity, unless you want to go down the route of saying that, like the way we do about existentialism and that it's our lacks that cause us to have desires. It's that nothingness leads to action. Nothingness has force, which is an interesting idea. Then it feels like it's kind of a weird way to talk about it.

10:40 John: One thing to think about is that he seems to like things that have a character, that have some kind of inward being that manifests itself outwardly. And what he says about the public that he finds disturbing is its lack of character. It is one day enthusiastic about this, one day enthusiastic about that.

11:00 Dylan: How do you point to the public, though? How do you point and say that's the public and that's the thing that's causing the problem?

11:07 Seth: It's not causing the problem. I think it's the canvas against which we generate problems.

11:12 John: I think you have to think of this as a phenomenological state, like falling or something from Heidegger or something like that. Where sometimes you are part of the public in your behavior. When is that? When you're echoing something, when you're forming not a very well informed opinion based on just something you've read. I think there are certain behaviors that are public behaviors rather than communal or individual. And I think that it's always out there to join in. You can use that as an interpretive tool to say you're behaving like the public, you're just a part of the crowd.

I think it's that kind of category. I mean, his extreme individualism comes in here. He doesn't seem to believe, and he even writes that age of associating and communities forming groups may have been passed because the public kind of sucks them into its vortex too quickly and that associations are not even really possible. That the only possibility in the face of the public is to become an individual. That's the only two real possibilities. He does seem to suggest at certain points that there are ways to have vocations or Participation in social groups that are positive.

In other parts of the text, he sounds a much more dire note where he says, like, basically, this abyss is open. No matter what you try to do. You can't leap out of the snare of reflection. You will slide down it in some way, and the only way out is really religiosity.

12:42 Wes: Inwardness might be. Yeah, and I think religiosity is part of it. But inwardness is the sort of contrasting concept to publicness. He talks about inwardness being also, you know, I think ultimately he thinks religiosity is, at least according to my notes, a foundation for inwardness. This is from page 87. But that inwardness grounds our separateness as people, which he thinks grounds the possibility of passionate relations with each other.

13:14 John: I think on 85, this is a very good description of what it is like to be a part of the public rather than involved in some kind of concrete activity. The individual does not belong to God, to himself, to the beloved, to his art, to his scholarship, no, just as a serf belongs to an estate. So the individual realizes that in every respect, he belongs to an abstraction in which reflection subordinates. If a group of people in our age could decide, each one individually, to give all his fortune to some good cause, it would not follow as a matter of course that the empty could decide to do it.

And again, not because he was irresolute about renouncing his fortune, because he feared the judgment of reflection much more than he feared poverty. So I think what he's saying is people's desire or fear of the reflection of public opinion is driving their activity. And that's the pernicious part of the public. Like, rather than someone saying, I'm devoted to an art. I'm an artist, and that's what matters to me. They relate to their art in such a way. It was like, well, how will the public receive my art? And people do think that way. I mean, that's even kind of a commonplace way of thinking.

I think that he contrasts this true commitment to this kind of commitment to the judgment of reflection. And that's reflected in the press, and it's reflected now, today on social media or just in the general ambient noise of what is valuable to do in our society. And I think he would say, look, you know, it might be, you know, kind of simple and almost cliche. He would say, look, don't worry about that shit. Do what you find to be passionately driving you, and do not worry about the judgment of the public. And I think that that's hard because People fear getting mocked.

If they embark on some project, they say, well, what will people say? What will they say about me on social media? If I write something, I will be thought of as being stupid. Okay, well, one person might think you're stupid. Who gives a shit? What do they know? When that person becomes the reflection of the public and not just some other concrete individual whose opinion is limited, but they become invested with this power of judgment of this giant force that becomes extremely intimidating. And I think that's just like as a lesson to self or just any activity you undertake.

It's just like others opinions. It's just their opinion. It is not coming from the voice of God. Public opinion is not the voice of God, I think, is the underlying message there.

15:31 Mark: I've been trying to divide this a little into the individual critique and the phenomenology of dealing with the public. Of course, these are related because one of the things that you face as an individual is that you are faced with the public and how you're going to this unapproachable. Again, early on page 69, he said, the individual and generation are continually contradicting themselves and each other. I think Dylan had said, what is the public? There's another quote on page 92. The public remains the public, even if it becomes its very opposite.

And so that's just something like you were just saying, John, that we get this, that we'll get a lot of praise from listeners and then we'll get a negative comment. And I'll take it like this is pointing out something objective. You know, if this person has this opinion, probably lots of other people do. It's a representative of some subsection of the populace that would encounter what we do. Maybe we should alter what we do to deflect this criticism. Or maybe I just get mad about it. But why it's so difficult to treat with a group of people like, politically, I want to make peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

And then. But no matter what some particular head of the government might say, some individual, since the public is irreducibly plural, can fuck it up. So that's kind of just what dealing with the public is, that when they say it's the public is fickle. It's not necessarily that individuals are so shallow that they keep changing their minds. It's that different members of the public are reaching out. And so when you're saying, I'm booed on one day and cheered on the other day, well, Trump experiences this every day. It's just different groups of people within the public.

And it's kind of frustrating that the public can't just, you know, as Hegel might have thought, that there can't be a really geist that captures the public, that, like, every time you try to make sense of what. But the public thinks that, you're wrong because the public is irreducibly plural. So I find that really interesting. That's kind of a separate issue from, you know, are you being authentic in being a member of the public? Are you mouthing cliches, or are you speaking authentically from a place of silence? And the fact that the public is so immersive and unapproachable and not like an actual concrete peer group, but this abstract thing that can never actually become your friend, that this might actually be something that gives you.

By reacting to that, you can become independent and more inward and grow in the way Kierkegaard wants you to.

17:53 Wes: Right. I mean, there's a definite relation between inwardness and the public. Right. At various points. Inwardness is what the age makes harder or impossible and its anathema to the public. So on page 79, what should such a relation be called? Attention, I think, but not, please note. Attention that strains every nerve to the point of denouement, but attention that enervates life. Gone are the fervor, enthusiasm, and inwardness that make the links of dependency in the crown of rural light, that make the child's obedience and the father's authority happy, that make the deference of admiration and the elevation of distinction frank and cheerful, that give the teacher valid significance and thus give the pupil opportunity to learn, that unite the frailty of the woman and the strength of the man in equal intensity of devotedness.

The relation still does remain, but it lacks the resilience to concentrate itself in inwardness so as to be united harmoniously. This is one of the places, and there are a few of them, where he's trying to describe how inwardness grounds actual connection between people. And that's the thing I take to be lacking at the level of the public. He talks a lot about the lack of concreteness. I mean, the ultimate foundation of this is the kind of relations between human beings that ground it. And I think in a genuine community, you could say this reminds me of Burke a little bit, because Burke, one of the things he's lamenting is when you undo hierarchy, you're undoing the more profound linkages between human beings that ground actual community.

So this looks to me like Kierkegaard's version of that.

19:31 Dylan: Yeah. A community is Connected individuals forming a greater whole rather than a heap, a public is like a heap of unconnected individuals. It could be any shape at all.

19:42 John: Where Kierkegaard to me is more appealing than Burke or Nietzsche, as we discussed a little bit, is that he says, okay, well you know, there was a value in those institutions and in those relations that they're gone now. It's not for us to lament them and try to preserve them, but rather in this condition where does authentic human existence live? It doesn't live in the kind of sentimental preservation of, of those gone institutions. It requires a fundamentally new form of life. And I think that's what he's been beginning to try to sketch out and indirectly communicate to his readers is that I think he would say lamentation for the old ways is just as much as a self deception or leveling process as trying to tear everything down.

So I think that that's sort of what's more profound and more appealing. Even though there's absolutely a way to read this text as conservative or even reactionary and say, look, he's saying once you pull up all the roots, you know, that's it. But he's saying, no, when you pull up all the roots, then that's when you start to get at what's real about being a human being. When there's no more mediating anything. He said those mediating anything were positive and supported people. But now people. It's almost pro enlightenment in the Kantian where he's saying, well, human beings aren't children anymore.

Now we actually have to confront this sort of groundlessness. I definitely see there's a qualified or dialectical, not defense, but recognition that these conservative social institutions had a edifying purpose.

21:18 Wes: Yeah, I didn't mean to say that he was wanting to go back or that he's concerned with exactly the same things Burke is, but. But I wonder ultimately the relationship between inwardness and passion. I take it that the religiosity is going to be the passion that the way you work through get beyond the abstraction that is the public. It seems like inwardness and relatedness are two things that need each other. It's just that if your relatedness, maybe it's pagan even. Maybe if pagan, not really. But anyway, if relatedness fails on the level of community, let's say maybe what's left is relatedness, religious relatedness. I don't know if that's to God

22:02 John: or his theology basically thinks, you know, you're in this lonely place before God. I mean, how much you want to buy into that you can take away a lot from the text without subscribing to that entirely. I think what religiosity and inwardness are for Kierkegaard is something like, are you willing to embark on a project with no guarantee of success from others, approbation or success in the world, but you fundamentally have faith in it. And that comes from within. You know, people are to. I think obviously everything in writing is abstract. I think people are to relative degrees.

I think everyone has these sorts of passions and they organize their lives around them. I think some people get into it a bit more forcefully and some people are a little bit more fearful. But I think most average people have a combination of this religious inwardness about what they are passionate about in their life in terms of their relationships to other people, in terms of love, in terms of their avocations. And I think that that is what he sees as worthwhile. And I think he sees a constant distraction and attention to the opinion of this phantom public to tear people away from what he thinks that grounding and important experiences.

Does it necessarily have to do with God for him? Yes, But I think that the secular interpretations of Kierkegaard are persuasive. I think that what he's talking about can be applied. It doesn't mangle it so much that you don't know what he's talking about. Once you take religion in the sense of literal Christianity away from it, I think what he's talking about makes some sense.

23:39 Wes: I think, by the way, there's a good example of taking the safe route. You know, something we would all recognize that Kierkegaard gives On page. Page 75 when talking about money. A young man today would scarcely envy another his capacities or his skill or the love of a beautiful girl or his fame. Know he would envy him his money. Give me money, the young man will say, and I will be all right. And the young man will not do anything rash. He will not do anything he has to repent of. He will not have anything for which to reproach himself. He will die in the illusion that if he had money, then he would have lived. Then he certainly would have done something great.

24:14 Mark: Yeah, I think there's just something in the text that he's reviewing. There's like an incident that he refers to where somebody falls in love, but then is like, ah, no, it's I need to make my fortune before I can marry this girl or something. So this is something he's saying is typical of his age, which I think that's an Obvious disanalogy like that specifically is not something. Whatever we may think about if we think love has been debased or trivialized by romantic comedies or something like that particular thing seems. I don't know, at least in the parts of the culture that I'm most familiar with, I think we romanticize love.

24:50 John: Totally disagree. I mean, maybe it's not financial, but people are constantly reflecting, is this the right person for me? So on and so forth. I mean, he did that too, because he left his fiance, but whatever. But I think people are constantly making those sorts of calculations where they say, instead of just being like, look, I'm in love with this person. That's all that matters is kind of passionate devotion. Everyone's like, well, are they similar enough? To me, is it right that they do this and they do that and so on and so forth. I think that it might not be literally.

And I think people break up all the time about reasons of career and so on, quote, unquote, compatibility, et cetera, et cetera. I think what he's describing, people reflect themselves out of love all the time. There's still romanticism about love. I mean, it's very rare. When you see someone and we make fun of it as he would say, if you see somebody do something rash out of love, if someone says, moves across the world and gives up their career and so on, so forth, you say, that guy's kind of a fool. They could break up. It's not really going to work out.

And then if it does, you say, oh, look, you see, you schmuck, you shouldn't have done that. You made a bad move. So I think what he's saying about that is, okay, we still talk about love in romantic terms, but I do believe people's reflections on whether or not this love is appropriate or if it's right for me or it's right for this person, so and so forth. That is a dominating tendency as well.

26:10 Mark: Don't you think that's sort of positive? My observation is that the first great love of your life is probably not the person you should marry. That at least you should have a time apart to reflect on this as to whether this is really the thing. Because when you're in, especially if this is the first time you've experienced it and you romanticize it, then, like, no matter really how bad the person is for you, it's gonna take some major straining or conflict for that to break off in some way. And so it's almost like even if it's on a temporary basis, break up with your high school sweetheart, the first person you meet in college, probably then you are smarter about who actually you're compatible with and what you're actually looking for.

And so those sorts of considerations, that's very different than like, I'm not gonna even date anybody who isn't on a good career path or isn't Jewish or whatever the, you know, non romantic criterion are. But just getting to know yourself better as a person and not make a big stupid blunder, as he sort of romantically says, that the current age is preventing us from falling into. That would be much more spirited, I guess, if we were allowed to make those giant blunders.

27:17 John: Yeah, that's a little silly. I mean, but we are also living in reflective age and would think that in this particular issue you can talk about the contradictions of his own conduct. The guy spent most of his time thinking and writing. So he's not against reflection. He also, through an intense period of reflection, decided to leave his fiance. So him romanticizing, just jumping in and not overthinking it in terms of romantic relationships rings a little hollow.

27:44 Seth: To circle back to this notion that he's advancing a critique of enlightenment. It sounds like you're characterizing him a little bit as a throwback, like he's appealing to romanticism and it's like almost a nostalgic appeal to romanticism as the antidote for rational humanism or the enlightenment, isn't it? With him we can't avoid the religious question. It really comes down to he's not a naive romantic. You know, he's not a Shelley or a Byron or something like that. It feels like he's diagnosing a loss of spirituality or a loss of connection to God, but in his very special brand of connection to God.

And I mean, ultimately, don't we have to kind of just acknowledge that? And even though we, we like the critique, his antidote is maybe not something that's going to be palatable to, certainly not to Most of the 20th century thinkers who, who picked up on the same critique or who were running with the same thing. Not a Heidegger, not any of the Frankfurt school, not any of the French thinkers. Right?

28:46 John: Yeah. I don't know how to dispose or not dispose of the religious aspect of it. I tried earlier just to say maybe because his religiosity is so individualistic, it can take many forms. And it doesn't have to be some kind of institutional, it should not be some kind of institutional participation in religion. It is a belief in something, though. If you said, well, it doesn't really have to be God, he would say, no, yes, it absolutely does. Otherwise you're misunderstanding it entirely.

29:11 Wes: You know, we might say it has to serve, at least serve the same function as God, which might be something meaning conferring. Right? So Nietzsche's our man. If we want to try to say, well, what is it that could serve that function without actually being God anymore? And I think for Nietzsche it would have something to do with the aesthetic, but we need not accept that. But it might be the case that would it have to be something. You know, it's more than a passion in the sense of, oh, I really love music and this is going to be the center of my life. The way I'm describing it is have some sort of meaning conferring function, you know, some meaning of life level significance to adequately do that.

29:51 John: I think it can be anything so long as you relate to it in that meaning conferring way, which has to

29:57 Mark: be that it's calling you. I mean, you can talk about you making the leap and putting your faith in this, but it's because there is a calling. And this is why I liked at the beginning, Wes, you brought up Sandel's notion of the thick self, that I think that's exactly the kind of thing that he had in mind, that there are things in ethics that we do not choose, you know, that we are born. And I was trying to relate this to identity politics and stuff like that, that it seems that there are things, according to Sandel at least, that we just find ourselves, if we pay attention to it, with some obligations that kind of were there even before we were born or a role that we were born into.

And that is something that to not have a hollow life that we should embrace. And I think that is compatible with what Kierkegaard is going to say specifically. If you look inside yourself, you're going to find that that's religiosity. But again, he's been talking to an audience of casual Christians in his age, that for them, what deep seriousness, what inwardness would reveal is that they should become better, more serious Christians. And that's maybe not the same audience that he's addressing now.

31:06 Dylan: Isn't that one way of characterizing the problem of reflection is that you turn your life into a series of choices rather than a series of callings? This is another way of talking about your authentic self, the distinction between finding yourself and making yourself. And part of what's going on here is saying that part of having a authentic self Is finding out who you are. You know, immediately there comes all these complications about the distinction between becoming and being. But that idea that there are things that you can't help but be attracted to, that call you and grab ahold of you, and that's part of who you are, that's part of your thick self. That all sounds a lot like becoming who you are.

31:51 Wes: And it would get us back to character, which is. For Kierkegaard, character is inwardness in a way.

31:57 Dylan: To me, you get into the lane of questions, of the way in which refinement happens and change. So that becoming who you are is complicated. Because there is the notion of refinement and change and even transformation involved in it. That is, in the becoming side, in the sense that there is a being aspect of it. Is what was there in the first

32:19 John: place that connects it up with the religious problem is that. I mean, on a metaphysical level, if it exists somewhere, yourself exists somewhere, it implies that there's something permanent or something out there. This implies that it's existing in some eternal realm. And I think that that jump from believing in character and believing that you have a self and believing in religion makes sense in that light because it has to be there somewhere. It's not in the observable world. It's something that you have faith in. That kind of makes a connection for me.

Although it's difficult to believe in that sometimes. Why is it compelling if we don't really believe that? It does seem to reflect the way we actually relate to ourselves and the way we kind of recognize in ourselves things that we find meaningful and we don't. And the way we actually pick up on authenticity and inauthenticity in the world. So giving it a religious dimension, I mean, it seems like there's something metaphysical there, right? They have a solid exist somewhere that's giving you messages. Something like that.

33:22 Wes: Right.

33:22 Dylan: He makes the distinction between doing things on principle, which is part of this whole nihilistic way of living, which is highly abstract, and he's less explicit about this. But it's implied there that they'd be doing things having principles. Having principles would be in line with this. Maybe a less religiously oriented notion of they're part of the. I don't know, the foundational structures of your character. Right. You have them because. Because you have them. Right. And there isn't much more to say about it. You could talk about how they're connected, how they form yourself and stuff like that, but you don't have a really, really good reflective reason for about how they work together as opposed to doing things on principle.

34:06 John: I would say he would want to defend the inarticulable reasons why you do things. And he would say, let's look very suspiciously at someone who can articulate all the reasons they like to do things and do X and do Y. And that makes a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, people who are kind of remake their life based on some abstract principle. It's strange and kind of disturbing sometimes. Here's a little contradiction. His own conduct or own thing and his own worship of Socrates in the text. He writes elsewhere about these figures who, to the outward world do not seem anything special.

I think he calls them the unrecognized ones here. He calls them knights of faith. Elsewhere, where he's saying, like, look to the naked eye, this person is nothing special, but they are in touch with themselves in some way that most people are not. And I think that that's kind of in tension with his own desire to do. And his worship of Socrates, like we said, Socrates irony, where he had to go out and do something that was strange to people. And Kierkegaard's own need to make a spectacle of himself. In some ways, this need to be a performative idiocy, where this performative idiocy shows to people the kind of irrationality of life that you just have to accept, or something like that.

I think that he's always advocating for this quiet spiritual connection that people who are not famous or interesting in any way can have. And yet his own life was so dedicated to making this spectacle of himself and becoming a famous writer and becoming an object of public fascination through his own use of pseudonyms. But he does seem to undercut himself in those ways where he says the authentic life needn't be something spectacular. And then other times he feels the need to make this splash in order to shake other people up and to remind them of their own authenticity in some way.

36:03 Mark: Yeah. So the unrecognizables thing, I thought was an interesting concept here, page 109. It's right near the end of the essay. He gets into this a little bit, kind of, what should you actually do? I mean, you should become inward, but can you help other people? And he says the unrecognizables recognize the servants of leveling, but dare not use power or authority against them. For then there would be a regression, because it would instantly be obvious to a third party that the unrecognizable one was an authority. And then the third party would be hindered from attaining the highest. In other words, attaining the highest. The goal here is not something someone else can order you to do.

36:39 John: Yeah.

36:39 Mark: So even if you are a knight of faith, you can't then, you know, as a professor, just direct someone. This is exactly what it seems like in his writing. He's doing that at great length. So I don't know what to make of that. But he does say positively, only through a suffering act will the unrecognizable one dare to contribute to leveling. And by the same suffering act will pass judgment on the instrument, on leveling.

37:04 John: That is obviously talking about himself, obviously talking about the Corsair affair and what he went through. And it's difficult to take seriously. Or maybe his own breaking off his engagement. Regine Olsen so he's saying what I went through by getting dragged in public by the Corsair is a good example of which is, you know, he's a Christian. He obviously is thinking of the crucifixion there. And it's a little bit arrogant or even absurd to say, okay, well, by their suffering, you know, you'll know these saints. Because he's obviously giving himself that role, even though he's saying, well, you can't really give yourself that role.

This is one of the parts of the text where I start to have my. And maybe this is intentional as part of his irony is that this is where I begin to say, I don't know about this guy. I think maybe that's the point of the text because he says in other parts he's saying, look, everybody comes up with prophecies these days. And so like, what am I really contributing? I think he has these. And maybe it's granting him too much credit, which then gives him authority again. But I think he has these strategies for even distancing you from him as a writer and not try to think of him as an authority on any subject or not.

I do think that his, as we were talking a little bit during the break, his humanity comes out here in the sense that we see his own self regard about what he went through and how he thinks it makes him special and an example for other people. And obviously that that self regard and that is difficult to take. Is it difficult to take because that is ridiculous or is that genuinely a part of people who are exceptional, will they always have that self regard which grates other people? I don't know. From my perspective, he's feeling sorry for himself and trying to turn this unfortunate circumstance he got himself into in his life into something spiritually Significant, which that might be an overly cynical reading of it, but I can't avoid that conclusion sometimes reading it, other times it seems extremely profound.

I think when it seems least profound to me is when he seems to lift himself up as some kind of paragon of virtue.

39:14 Mark: Wes was saying earlier how the public, how the current situation seems to prevent finding inwardness, right? Chatter silences inwardness. But I think he also says so this is page 89 ish. Reflection is a snare in which one is trapped. But in and through the inspired leap of religiousness, the situation changes and it is the snare that catapults one into the embrace of the eternal. Reflection can't actually get you to the essentially religious, but by means of glittering illusion it can tempt everybody away from all else. So it sounds like he's been raging against being overly reflective here, but he actually sees, of course, reflection is good, right? If you listen to our previous episode on Kierkegaard and what the self is, it's reflection that gives rise to. It's just reflection taken to perversion where it prevents any action is bad.

40:07 John: I think that that's where he views Socrates as a kind of paradigm where it's reflection used properly to find out how to live your life and not to avoid living your life. In the introduction to one of the translations, I thought there was a really good quote, he offers a third alternative between reflection and just immediate action in the name of Socrates. A third alternative. First, the spontaneity of immediate inspiration, as in the age of revolution. Second, the growth of understanding and ingenuity in the service of prudence, a proper use of reflection, the present age's typical mode.

And third, the highest and most intensive inspiration of a Socrates who sees very well what the prudent thing to do is and does not do it. I think he's saying there is a third type of reflection or thoughtfulness or whatever that does not get you stuck, but actually pushes you along. And I think that that's just true. I mean, that's what you guys are kind of doing here, right? You're hoping, partially examined life. There's a hope that you can use a little bit of reflective reason and thinking about your life. But you live a life too. It's not pure abstract, constantly thinking, what am I doing?

What he's describing sounds very strange because it's difficult to pin down when that's actually happening. But I think that that is something that, when you properly have these things in balance, is what happens when you reflect. But how do you Know when you reflected enough and it's time to make a decision.

41:27 Mark: Yeah. I thought there was somewhere else where he was saying even more directly how, yes, chatter seems to drown out silence. But also because it's so horrific and because you try to go along with the crowd and they turn on you like that. This phenomenon itself gives rise to. In select individuals, at least to inwardness and to the right kind of reflection and to becoming, you know, gaining the highest.

41:53 John: Yeah, I think you realize it's kind of a racket. Chasing all these trends and all these beliefs and so on and so forth doesn't get you anywhere. And once you kind of see through that, you're in a much better place about the way you think about your own life. Think about someone who's trying to be cool all the time. That's always shifting. The public just changes what's cool. I think at some point in most mature people's lives, they say to themselves, I don't want to play that game anymore. It's not worth it. I realize how horrible it is and how it's just kind of dashing myself from position to position.

And there's not, you know, I don't know who I am anymore. He seems to say that the experiences he's talking about are extremely unique and special. But I tend to think, actually, no, people intuitively come to those conclusions where they see that the chatter of the world doesn't matter that much. And what matters is my own relationship to what I love. And I can see that the chatter of the world doesn't get you anywhere. It just will lead you from place to place. And it has no consistency or no character. I don't want to dumb down the text too much, but you can really connect this to phenomena in everybody's lives where they just decide, man, that's bullshit.

I'm not gonna fucking care about that anymore. And I'm gonna do me. Does that sound right to you guys?

43:09 Mark: Yeah, maybe. As our I want to hear from everybody kind of, what parts of this resonated with you? What parts of it you think are bullshit? Is there something apart from just his potential? The contradictions between his own life and his advice? I think we've gone into that enough. How much is this connecting with you as a critique of the present age, as good self help, or what?

43:29 Seth: I started off commenting about reading this made me think about our episode on enlightenment and critiques of enlightenment. Reading this and talking about it, I thought of Heidegger. I thought of the society, of the spectacle. I thought of the recent Fukuyama episode that we did. All of which points to a sense in which there's a lot of people and a lot of work being done that has been done to try to characterized the age. And I think Wes is right in saying it's like the age is like the public. It's not a thing, it's a name that we give to a thing.

But it's a multifaceted and varied. All this helps in some respect, to diagnose. But to take Kierkegaard's own admonition, what's the connection to action? How do we translate this diagnosis about the public and the press into action? And how do we become passionate about it? You know, maybe I'm just getting old, and maybe we've been doing this for a decade now, but I'm more interested in solutions than I am in clever diagnosis and description. That being said, I mean, of course, Kierkegaard is probably one of the better writers in the history of philosophy, so it's entertaining to read.

I think in general, I'm kind of over hagiography with the philosophers. Like, I've always had, you know, this sense of reverence, I guess, because we chose to study it and all that, but I'm just kind of over it now. Like, when somebody's being petty, it's like, okay, you're fucking being petty. Like, it's not like, Hegel, you know, or Kant. And so I'm not saying that I'd rather study biography than. But disentangling the thoughts from the snipes. And this is maybe one of the things about Nietzsche that bugs me a little bit too, is just that it's like, okay, okay, okay.

You're using this as a canvas to get out your personal aggressions and all that, and that's fine, but could you at least flag them? Maybe we need a new era of scholarship where they're, like, tagging things that are actual ideas versus, oh, by the way, this is where he's putting a dig at somebody else. I'm reading this book called. I think it's called the Philosopher and the Antichrist, about Human Smith. And this guy's spending a lot of time sort of untangling the relationship and trying to piece together who influenced who and who were they talking about and what were all the various.

But he's doing it in an interesting way that's helping to illuminate, like, simultaneously distinguish the political and the social ideas that are reflective of the age and the individuals they're interacting versus, like, the philosophical content. And so I guess maybe I'm just on a screed right now.

46:05 Dylan: For me, one of the things that I wanted to think about, I think was central to what he's writing about is the way in which sort of the noise of everyday life, public life interacting, gets in the way of becoming who you are or gets in the way of living a full life and is either distracting or discouraging. I said at the beginning that I find myself, when I read these things, a little skeptical that it's something that's genuinely new. And I want to follow up with the fact that I don't, on the one hand, think that is genuinely a new problem. But I do wonder if there's something new even in our current age, that there's something importantly different about the Internet, just like there might have been something importantly different about magazines and printing, that even though we look back, oh, look, magazines and printing.

They used to set type and used to take, you know, 12 days for them to send out a thousand sheets of paper. Isn't that quaint? But I want to avoid dismissing that effect on us individually and as a community. And I think the same thing. I need to remind myself about the effect of the Internet and how it changes my interaction with other people and with media and with myself. And so I guess I'm left feeling like he has a pretty contemporary feeling diagnosis of it, despite a bit of his whining about it. And that this problem of I'll call it becoming who you are in the face of all that noise is a challenge.

And the way he articulates that challenge has some resonance.

47:40 Mark: I think the way Dreyfus put Kierkegaard in context was to contrast him with folks like Habermas and Burke and Kant who said, this is great, that. That we have mass media that enables everybody to weigh an opinion mill this picture of the public space that then will allow ideas to be debated, and that these figures, according to Dreyfus, did bemoan some of the excesses and the fact that, okay, well, you've created this public space, it can turn toxic. According to Dreyfus, Again, Kierkegaard isn't just saying, like those other guys, that, okay, well, let's keep what's good about this democratization and just try to address whatever decay might be occurring within it.

But Kierkegaard says, no, this just shows that there was something fundamentally screwed up about these enlightenment notions in the first place. And I just don't agree with that. I agree with the other people that Dreyfus is citing. Of course, anything taken to extremes is probably going to have negative effects. But some of the other things I pointed out, I think a more mature take on love, rather than merely a romantic blundering is an improvement overall for happiness. So it's kind of the same with Nietzsche worrying about, oh, we're becoming two, it's the science of happiness, we're becoming the last man.

Like, okay, well we don't want to go to that extreme, but that doesn't mean that we somehow have to get rid of the whole principle that would take us toward actually trying to improve the world. Another example that Kierkegaard gives is towards politics. He has this picture of royalty. Like we don't want to overthrow the king, we want to leave the king in place, but just make it more of a spectacle, make it more of a game that the king doesn't actually have any power. And it makes me think about like what actually happened with British royalty.

And you know, I'm not British, I haven't thought this much about that. But like for something with that history, it actually seems like that's okay. Like people get a lot of joy out of the spectacle of royalty and thank God that those people don't have the power anymore to have individual citizens heads chopped off. Like the actual power has been taken out of those bastards hands. But like it's still, you know, I'm not like Robert Smith of the Cure who's just like denounces all of his fellow musicians for accepting knighthoods and like is just, just so, the remnants of monarchy are just so offensive to my, I don't know, I'm not a member of that society.

So I, I, I can't say either way. Yeah, I find it weird that we compare the complaining about Twitter mobs. We compare them with actual mobs, right. People with torches. But in this essay, Kierkegaard actually praises by comparison. Like if you actually are in an act, a real mob physically and have to pick up a torch, you're putting yourself out there in a way the people on the Internet don't.

50:36 Wes: Well, the difference is that people actually do have their lives ruined and social media is used for, you know, has gotten people killed.

50:47 John: There was just a terrorist, terrorist attacks yesterday.

50:50 Wes: So for instance in certain Indian villages where there's rumors of child kidnappings and people get killed and, and then as far as the damage the Twitter mob does, it's usually just to ruin someone's reputation, get them fired from a job. And most of us are too scared to say what we think anyway, on Twitter. So there are real consequences to expressing political opinions. Once upon a time, to write an article for a newspaper didn't mean that you could be harassed or that people would figure out where you lived and make threats or publish your address online. All those things are real. So I think that's different in our age than it was in Kierkegaard's time.

51:32 John: I think it's quite a sinister. He was harassed and made fun of, but I don't think he was in any physical danger or in danger of losing his livelihood. Okay, so this text, I've read it so many times, I am ready now to stop.

51:49 Mark: You've come to closure.

51:51 John: Yeah, I've come to closure. Each diagnosis, to me, of the parts of contemporary life that are going to suck us in and we're not even fully aware of what's happening, I think are incredibly incisive. And I think it's enlightening in the sense that it will clue you into processes that you're vaguely aware of that you say, why do I find this so exhausting or enervating? Or, why is this sucking the life out of me? And I think in his very wonderful prose, he is able to clarify what's going on in those. Like I said earlier, but, you know, I'm a writer.

I believe in public reason. I think that there's a value to the press. I cannot, as you guys say, subscribe to the wholesale cutting off of that as a human possibility. Although I do think maybe Dreyfus is wrong there. I think, you know, obviously Kierkegaard was a writer. He praises people. He even praises journalists at some point. Have a serious engagement. I think Dreyfus actually takes that a bit too far. And that's his own Heidegger shit, is to say that this is a wholesale critique of Enlightenment. It was written in the context of literature, of a literary world.

He published this in a journal. He was obviously engaged in what was going on around him. This was meant to communicate with his audience. And I think that that really says this is a part of the reflective world of the public sphere. It's a critical, incisively, critical part of some of its darker corners. But to say that it is a wholesale rejection of the possibility of public exercise of reason, to me, is not right. I think it does point out that there are limitations. There are serious limitations and drawbacks to living in a time of great reflection.

And there are points at which, and I think this is just a commonplace that most people agree with, is you have to just stop. And you have to just say, you know what? This is what I believe, and this is the way I'm going to proceed. I can't constantly be in this web of what ifs and reflections and so on and so forth. Dreyfus interpretation is extreme. There are parts of the text where I can see that, yeah, Kierkegaard's going that way, but I think that that's an extreme interpretation. I'm very grateful for the text pointing out to me. Even behavior on my own part where I think it's like, you're not really spending your time in a way that.

That's doing anything that you truly love doing. You're passing it and trying to get involved in these sort of pseudo activities of being part of the public. I think in terms of his commentary on social media mobs, it's not so much that, you know, it's so horrible that people get destroyed because he said, no. It's actually. I mean, this is a little nutty. But he says it's good for them. Don't worry about them, don't feel sorry for them. That's actually going to be a good experience for them.

54:33 Wes: They will discover God.

54:34 Seth: Yeah, speak up, Wes. You've got a huge transformation just awaiting you. At you on Twitter.

54:39 John: Yeah, it's gonna be better for you. I think what he. What he points out is that it's not so much that, you know, people are cruel and it's just a waste of your. Of your human time on this earth to be involved in this, because it's nothing yours. It's not yours. It's something that's just out there. It's not like, this is my piece of art. This is my book. This is what I have, you know, put all my energy and love in my life into. It's just a thing that goes by on the street and you join in like a parade and then it's over. I mean, I think he's very sensitive to the cruelty and the degradation that's involved in that.

But I think what he's pointing out is something of the emptiness and the void of it. I think that that's an extremely valuable thing in my own life, because when I do get involved in public reason, it's a political commitment, and I want to affect change. So I will engage in activity. I mean, I'll call somebody an idiot on the Internet. I don't give a fuck. Will I stop? I don't know. But it definitely gives me pause and says, are you getting involved in some kind of ridiculous mob activity, or is this your genuine opinion here? Like, just gives me another step before reflexively just doing what people on the Internet are doing.

And I think that, you know, it's important for me, and I think it's probably important for other people.

56:01 Wes: I used to express my political opinions a lot on Facebook and even lost some friends that way, and then have written some articles that got some notice. And then on Twitter, I might say something occasionally or like something occasionally, or retweet something occasionally. But I always try to think now in terms of am I actually doing anything that's constructive here, or am I just pissing people off and indulging my own anger? I'm not opposed to talking about my political opinions or pissing people off, but I feel like I should just do that at book length at this point, because I'm really gonna have political opinions. I ought to at least be able to just give some real substance to it and not say snarky things on Twitter.

56:46 John: And I think that's exactly what he's talking about.

56:49 Wes: The one thing I do try to do is, and that the Internet is good for is I get a very wide spectrum of of opinion that I didn't used to get because I certainly wasn't going to pick up a National Review or something like that. I was just reading the New York Times and then other magazines. But I think the drawback is, and the reason why I try to limit this severely at this point, it really is almost like an amphetamine just keeping myself overstimulated with anger and outrage and the tendency to direct that outrage towards individuals. But also, you know, to start getting into that thinking where you're blaming certain groups of people, I think is toxic.

And it's bad for my thinking and my reflectiveness, and it keeps me out of that. I mean, I relate very strongly to Kierkegaard's talk of inwardness because I've been trying to cultivate that. And it's something that I felt like I lost with the advent of the Internet.

57:42 Mark: So if we were going to read more Kierkegaard, I do like the idea of investigating this inwardness, which I think he's pretty extreme about that. I mean, what you're talking about, Wes, is sort of the difference between gathering your thoughts together in a serious book length response. Right. Kierkegaard is sort of patting himself on the back that he's writing a book length review of this other novel that he read several times. And like, what a deep engagement he has, what a deep person he is. And all this talk about being born out of silence and don't voice your thoughts until you've really let the them churn and can give them in their perfect formulation.

You know, I think what we're talking about in terms of social media and reacting to people in the moment is, I would advise some kind of moderation. Of course, writing books is great, and collecting your thoughts such that you can write a whole book is wonderful. But what has fueled this and what you know, it actually is useful. He starts out saying, well, the public is unapproachable, but compared to actual peers. Right. That you are really interacting with, that you're having an authentic exchange of ideas with. That's good. But then by the end of the essay, he's turned around and he says, you can't save the age by the idea of sociality.

You should be skeptical of that. He says, not until the single individual has established an ethical stance despite the whole world. Not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting. So what sounded like before he was saying, you know, a Burkian, the community actually supporting you, that that's a good part, that that's necessary for some self development here. He's saying, at least as an adult, you know, no, you should lean toward totally retreating into yourself until you can get out of your silence a whole book of inspired thoughts that you can just eject onto the world as opposed to a more genuinely interactive, communicative.

I just find that weird. I don't think that's good advice.

59:30 John: It is very gratifying to share ideas, to get the instant gratification of people's response to them. But I think there's a great value in cutting yourself off from that for some time and letting things deeper in fusion, which I don't think happens enough. Because everyone gets instant gratification from even when they have great ideas, they share them quickly and they don't make much of an impact.

59:51 Wes: And it's affected people's writing. I've watched people's writing change over the years because of Twitter and online stuff, and I think it's often the case that it's decreased in quality.

1:00:01 Mark: All right, thanks, folks. Next time we are going to talk about Simone Weil's essay, the Iliad or the Poem of force from 1965. Corey Mohler will be coming back as the guest, so check that out at partiallyexaminedlife.com, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook. Lots of ways to reach out to us. Please don't give a book length response to this because I'm not going to read it. It might be good for you to retreat into yourself until you have such a firmly articulated thing, but nobody else wants to hear that. That shit. So short emails to us.

We'd love to hear from you or comment on the blog posts associated with this or on Facebook or anywhere else. Our closing song is Rye observer by Aaron David Gleason, whom you might remember from our Lysistrata performance. This was one of the songs discussed on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 71. Check that out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks, John, for doing this.

1:00:52 John: Thank you.

1:00:53 Mark: Thanks everybody.

1:00:54 Wes: Good night.

1:00:55 Seth: Good night.

1:00:55 Wes: Good night.

1:00:56 Dylan: Good night.

1:01:22 Unknown speaker: Just flies by night

1:01:27 John: but just some

1:01:28 Unknown speaker: blocks from the flatiron? Are you going to change my mind? I know you don't come off dangerous stainless, you're pristine? If I'm your prince, you, you have strange taste and maybe I'm a bit unique? I tried to die, I was denied? It's nothing more than a carnival? I'm here and I'm barely alive? I would say by silver lake blue? Wasn't it silver lake too? Just because adventure folds doesn't mean you're coming from the cold? I live to tell we're doing well? Creature comforts never comfort me? But just some blocks from the river? Give her a time to speak? You held my head like a baby? Lately I'm so serene?

1:03:14 Wes: Yes, I am?

1:03:17 Unknown speaker: I can't remember the crazy? Or maybe I'm a bit antique? I tried to die, I was denied? It's nothing more than a carnival ride out here? And I'm barely alive?

1:03:41 Seth: Hey,

1:03:44 Unknown speaker: I was saved by Silver Lake Blue wasn't in Silver Lake too? Oh, just because of angel phone doesn't mean you're coming from the cold? I live to tell? I live to tell? I live to tell? We're doing well.