[Greetings from Austin! For a while now, I’ve felt myself drawn to the works of Søren Kierkegaard—the Danish theologian and philosopher often considered the first existentialist. Many of his most famous works, like Sickness Unto Death (which examines his theory that despair results from an improper orientation to the divine), Fear and Trembling (which outlines the demands of true faith illustrated by the story of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son, Jacob), and Either/Or (which outlines the distinction between adopting the aesthetic or the ethical life as a mode of being) are notoriously difficult to penetrate. One line from Sickness Unto Death where Kierkegaard defines the self illustrates this: “relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”
But once you’ve infiltrated, the treasures stored in the vault are so vast that one could spend a lifetime on his works and never run out of new insights.
When I made the decision to leave Kierkegaard out of my first book, “This Way to the Stars: An Introduction to Philosophy,” I felt a little like I was betraying an old friend. On that day, I shook his hand (and those of a few other spirits) and vowed that one day I would tell his (and their) story in something like the “Lost Chapters” (to serve as a supplement to my first book). On the list of those I (reluctantly) decided to omit are the likes of Cicero, Meister Eckhart, Blaise Pascal, and Søren Kierkegaard. One day, the Lumenorean will deliver those Lost Chapters.
But for today, we’re going to look at one of Kierkegaard’s more accessible works: an essay titled “The Present Age,” which he wrote as part of a larger literary review of a work titled “Two Ages: A Literary Review.”1 In his essay, Kierkegaard reflects on the consequences of living in a society centered around media. Despite being written nearly 200 years ago, his insights remain remarkably relevant.]
“Our age,” Kierkegaard begins his essay, “is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose.”2 Our condition is “that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.”3
Where “[a] revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is immediate publicity everywhere.”4 “There is no more action or decision in our day than there is perilous delight in swimming in shallow waters.”5
With these lines coming in the first few pages of his essay, Kierkegaard’s main critique of the present age comes into view: it is an age where the individual has been demolished by the masses. Where the mass media and culture make big somethings out of big nothings simply because they need something to talk about. Where people would rather entertain themselves with gossip than their own attempts at creation. Where people yield to the pressures of social and cultural expectations without realizing it’s a slow exchange of the soul.
One need only spend five minutes watching what the mass media is peddling on any given day or reflecting on the last few years of weaponized narratives to see this phenomenon as alive today as it was in Kierkegaard’s day. The result? A society that is a barren wasteland lacking any vitality present in ages of action and enterprise. A society populated by people living in infinite anticipation. Forever on edge where something is always about to happen but never does.
It is often our own excessive deliberation that is the culprit. Years of teaching our youth to reduce all of experience to an exercise in rationality leads to an overdeveloped reflective tendency that kills all thoughts of glorious and irrational enterprises in their cradle—man’s overthinking tyrannizing his soul’s dreams.
Reflection [itself] is not the evil; but a reflective analysis and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.6
But even when one manages to break the bonds of his internal chains and dares to do, the media and masses are quick to the scene, ready to level the dynamic individual and send him back into shackles.
The Jewel on Ice
To illustrate the difference between the present age (a reflective and passionless age) and a passionate age, Kierkegaard uses an analogy of the Jewel on Ice. In the analogy, Kierkegaard asks the reader to imagine a precious jewel placed over thin ice in the middle of a frozen lake.
In a passionate age the crowds would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out, they would tremble for him and with him in the danger of his decisive action, they would grieve over him if he were drowned, they would make a god of him if he secured the prize. But in an age without passion, in a reflective age, it would be otherwise. People would think each other clever in agreeing that it was unreasonable and not even worth while to venture so far out. And in this way they would transform daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as to do something, for after all ‘something must be done.’ The crowds would go out to watch from a safe place, and with the eyes of connoisseurs appraise the accomplished skater who could skate almost to the very edge (i.e., as far as the ice was still safe and the danger had not yet begun) an then turn back. The most accomplished skater would manage to go out ot the furthermost point and then perform a still more dangerous-looking run, so as to make the spectators hold their breath and say: ‘Ye Gods! How mad; he is risking his life.’ But look, and you will see that his skill was so astonishing that he managed to turn back just in time, while the ice was perfectly safe and there was still no danger. As at the theatre, the crowd would applaud and acclaim him, surge homeward with the heroic artist in their midst, to honour him with a magnificent banquet.7
Ultimately, Kierkegaard points out, those same people who praised the skilled skater who never actually entered danger in public and at the banquet, would dismiss him in private. “The guests would probably go home [from the banquet] with an even stronger predisposition to the most dangerous, if also the most respectable, of all diseases: to admire in public what is considered unimportant in private—since everything is made into a joke.”8
Here, we come to one of the chief dangers of a passionless age comes into focus: it stands for nothing and thus stands on nothing. “[A]n age without passion has no values, and everything is transformed into representational ideas”9—mere shadows of the ideals people say they stand for but never act out. Or worse, the illusions and lies they praise in public are known to be false in private, until the whole society is going on with a facade.
This dissonance between the public and private life, of course, creates a disconnect between the inner and outer world. The tectonic plates of the psyche shift ever further apart and a chasm is created—despair, the sickness unto death, rushes in to fill the gap. There, the soul is cast, and the individual is condemned to drown.
Leveling: The Public, the Press, and Destruction of the Individual
If the pervasive sense of going along to get along attitude wasn’t enough to kill the individual, then there was still the sharp scythe of leveling that stands ready to finish us off. Leveling, Kierkegaard thought, was the “silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals”10 and pounds individuals into conformity—a process supported by the public (referring both to the formless collection of people and the individuals that make it up) and the press in a reflective age.
The Press, or mainstream media, is a dealer of narratives “which in conjunction with the passionless and reflective character of the age produces the abstract phantom: a public which in its turn is really the levelling power.”11 The Press are the image makers casting shadows on our wall and selling it as reality—weaponizing the opinions of the amorphous “public” to manipulate our behavior.
In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction… the Press [is] able to create that abstraction ‘the public’, consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization—and yet are held together as a whole.12
The Public, often inhabited by the twin demonic spirits of envy and resentment (often mobilized by the Press), works to drag down anyone who dares to break out. This is the “tallest blade gets cut” mentality that sees society seek to remove the legs from anyone who tries to rise. This move, Kierkegaard notes, is often done under the banner of equality but in actuality is motivated by envy.
[I]n an age which is very reflective and passionless envy is the negative unifying principle… If, for a moment, it should seem as though an individual were about to succeed in throwing off the yoke of reflection, he is at once pulled up by the opposition of the reflection which surrounds him. The envy which springs from reflection imprisons man’s will and his strength.13
Over time, this envy harbored by those secretly jealous of those who dare to act eventually bubbles into full-blown resentment.
[T]he further it is carried the more clearly does the envy of reflection become a moral ressentiment. Just as air in a sealed space becomes poisonous, so the imprisonment of reflection develops a culpable ressentiment if it is not ventilated by action or incident of any kind.14
This silent resentment then reveals itself in the form of bullying and belittling of any attempts at greatness to erase any distinction that might highlight the critic’s inadequacy.
The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of levelling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary: it hinders and stifles all action; it levels.15
Put in the frame of the famous Teddy Roosevelt speech, a passionless age is full of critics and few men in the arena. And those critics—the Public—keep a dog to set on the one who dares to deviate from the party line.
[T]he public keeps a dog to amuse it... If there is some one superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coat-tails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity—until the public tires, and says it may stop. That is an example of how the public levels.16
What makes this move so malicious, Kierkegaard notes, is that after the public’s dog molests the man, nobody is left to answer for the crime. “The public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog—they only subscribe. They neither set the dog on any one, nor whistle it off—directly. If asked they would answer: the dog is not mine, it has no master.”17
In a culture of cancellation, we don’t need to look far to find examples of what Kierkegaard is talking about here. One misstep in today’s world and the guillotine of the entire internet descends to chop your head off, only to wipe its hands and walk away guiltless, even if it turns out they had the facts wrong. Nobody is called to account for the head that rolls unjustly, and thus the heavy hand of the Public goes on administering (in)justice in the court of public opinion.
The Demolition of the Individual
The most tragic part of all this, thought Kierkegaard, was the total demolition of the sovereignty of the individual—a complete destruction of the Imago Dei (or image of God we bear).
As mentioned earlier, sometimes it is we who hold the knife. By our reflective tendencies and excessive reliance on rationality, we see through everything and then pride ourselves on our ability to see. But what we fail to recognize is that, as C.S. Lewis points out in the final lines of the Abolition of Man: we cannot go on “‘seeing through’ things for ever.”
The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.18
In this space, without any genuine vision of our own, we become susceptible to the whims of the public and outsource our thinking to the great mass that supplies a vision on our behalf. Slowly, we are stripped of our agency and soon swept to foreign shores without any recollection of how we got there. We arrive, unable to decide anything for ourselves, either because or brain has been hijacked by groupthink or because they have so atrophied that there are no muscles left to flex. We become useful idiots in the great leveling. Such is the risk of the present, passionless, media-consumed, and reflective age.
[T]here are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything. Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any other former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move. If at least some one were to overcome the reflection within him and happened to act, then immediately thousands of reflections would form an outward obstacle. Only a proposal to reconsider a plan is greeted with enthusiasm; action is met by indolence.19
“And so” Kierkegaard says near the end of his essay, “when the generation…has, through the scepticism of the principle association, started the hopeless forest fire of abstraction; when as a result of levelling with this scepticism, the generation has rid itself of the individual and of everything organic and concrete…”20
Then “[p]erhaps very many will cry out in despair, but it will not help them—already it is too late.”21
One additional piece of context relevant to the tone of Kierkegaard’s essay: its publication comes shortly after the “Corsair Affair,” where the satirical magazine called the “Corsair” made Kierkegaard the target of public ridicule on many occasions, even going so far as to call his manhood into question. For more on this, I recommend Podcast #790 of Art of Manliness.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age / On the Death of Rebellion, translated by Alexander Dru with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann (the “Present Age”), p. 3.
Present Age, p. 4.
Present Age, p. 6.
Present Age, p. 7.
Present Age, p. 42.
Present Age, p. 8-9.
Present Age, p. 9.
Present Age, p. 11.
Present Age, p. 23.
Present Age, p. 37.
Present Age, p. 33-34.
Present Age, p. 20.
Present Age, p. 20-21.
Present Age, p. 23.
Present Age, p. 39.
Present Age, p. 40.
C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man, p. 81.
Present Age, p. 53.
Present Age, p. 57.
Present Age, p. 57.