In his latest book (On the Internet. Thinking in Action, Routledge, 2001) philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus uses the Danish religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as his point of departure to discuss the world wide web as a place devoid of meaning. In fact the Internet, Deyfus argues, leads to a a life without meaning - to nihilism.
(Earlier and/or alternate version of Dreyfus' essay is avilable online as Kierkegaard on the Information Highway and Kierkegaard on the Internet.)
Kierkegaard is regarded as the founder of existentialist philosophy. His critique of reason and systematic rational philosophy, particularly Hegelianism, on the grounds that actual life cannot be contained within an abstract conceptual system was intended to clear the ground for an adequate consideration of faith and, accordingly, of religion - specifically Christianity.
Dreyfus is particularly insterested in a fragment titled Nutiden (The Present Age), which can ve found in the booklet En literair Anmeldelse (A Literary Review), that Kierkegaard published in 1846. En literair Anmeldelse is on the surface an extensive and flattering review of Mrs. Thomasine Gyllembourg's short story To Tidsaldere (Two Ages). Kirkegaard originally wrote the review for Nordisk Literaturtidende (Nordic Literary Journal), but could not get it published there because its bulk (more than 50 pages). Instead, Kirkegaard ended up publishing it as a stand-alone booklet.
The short-story that is the subject of Kierkegaard's review is composed of two parts, titled Revolutionstiden (The Revolutionary Age, i.e. the 1790ies) and Nutiden (The Present Age, i.e. the 1840ies). The age of the French revolution is portraited as passionate and dramatic, the present as an age of dispassionate reason. Mrs. Gyllembourg prefers the sound and fury the revolution, and so does Kierkegaard.
Mrs. Gyllembourg's short-story, which by no means is a literary masterpiece, is a love story that takes place with the French revolution and its aftermath as a backdrop. For Kierkegaard, however, the story is just an excuse to deliever a scathing review of contemporaneity. The object of Kierkegaards scorn is the the «reflective» (as opposed to «acting») bourgois that in neighter cold nor warm, but above all avoids action: «Tired by its chimeric efforts the present ages rests in perfect indolence. Its condition is like one who has just fallen asleep in the morning: first, great dreams, then laziness, and then a witty or clever excuse for staying in bed.»
Kierkegaard goes on to lament the collapse of the solid and high institutions of the past, religious as well as political. The present age is an age of «levelling», the middle ground reigns supreme. Contary to the revolutionary age, where open denial and opposition to authority was the norm, the age of reason is characterized by an imperceptible erotion of authority: «No person wishes to destroy the power of the king, not at all, but if little by little it can be reduced to nothing but a fiction, then everyone would be happy to cheer the king. No person wishes to pull down the pre-eminent, not at all, but if at the same time pre-eminence could be demonstrated to be a fiction, then everyone would be happy. Everyone want to keep Christian terminology, but with the secret knowledge that it doesn't require any decision or action. And so they are unrepentant, since they have not pulled down anything. People do not desire any more to have a strong king than they do a hero-liberator than they do religious authority, for they innocently wish the established order to exist, but with reflective knowledge, more or less, of its non-existence.»
What troubles Kierkegaard about "the present age" in particular is that a stratified social hierarchy og individuals is being replaced by an homogeneous mass - "the public". Kierkegaard believes that the public is "the most dangerous of all forces, and the most quiescent". Dangerous, because it will start marching if someone says "march!"; and quiescent, because the public never questions anything. The power of the public is proportional to its anonymity.
Kierkegaard lived in an age where the socity was in the middle of transition from autocracy to democracy. "present age" was an age characterised by transition from s view the public as the great "levelling-master", i.e. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
His main criticism is directed towards what he perceives as "enchanting illusions", i.e. make believe and feigned emotions, leading to the exclusion of real passion. Kierkegaard's description of his comtemporaries reads almost as a critique of postmodernity.
[Se also Garff 2000, p. 427ff]
The aspect of Nutiden that Dreyfus finds intersting, however, is where Kirkegaard expounds the villainous nature of pressen (i.e. the press - or what we today simply would call the media). Kierkegaard's main point is that the press serves to undermine commitment, and thus deprives life of any serious meaning.
Dreyfus elaborates Kierkegaard's three-stage answer (as it is presented in Enten/Eller (Either/Or) to the problem of lack of involvement posed by the press - Kierkegaard claim that to have a meaningful life the learner must pass through the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious spheres of existence - to suggest that only the first two stages - the aesthetic and the ethical - can be implemented with Information Technology and Net, while the final stage, which alone makes meaningful learning possible, is undermined rather than supported by the tendencies of the desituated and anonymous Net.
In the aesthetic sphere, the aesthete avoids commitments and lives in the categories of the interesting and the boring and wants to see as many interesting sights (sites) as possible. In the ethical sphere we would reach a "despair of possibility" brought on by the ease of making and unmaking commitments on the Net. Only in the religious sphere is nihilism overcome by making a risky, unconditional commitment. Dreyfus concludes that only by working closely with students in a shared situation in the real world can teachers with strong identities, ready to take risks to preserve their commitments, pass on their passion and skill to their students. In this shared context students can turn information into knowledge and practical wisdom.
The risk-free anonymity of the Internet, Dreyfus say, makes it a good medium for slander, innuendo, endless gossip, and ultimately, boredom. "Without some way of telling the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring." He later argues: "The nihilistic pull of the new network culture doesn't prohibit such personal commitment, but does inhibit."
Below some excerpts from Nutiden are presented. The page references in curly brackets (e.g. {63} are the same as those used by Dreyfus, and refers to Alexander Dru's 1962 translation. They are linked to the corresponding paragraph in the Danish original.
[. . .]
The present age is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion. An age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to rest back into indolence.
[. . .] Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking - one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation. Therefore, one can not really prosecute this generation, for its art, its understanding, its virtuosity and good sense lies in reaching a judgement or a decision, not in taking action.
{illusions} Just as one might say about Revolutionary Ages that they run out of control, one can say about the Present Age that it doesn't run at all. The individual and the generation come between and stop each other; and therefore the prosecuting attorney would find it impossible to admit any fact at all, because nothing happens in this generation. From a flood of indications one might think that either something extraordinary happened or something extraordinary was just about to happen. But one will have thought wrong, for indications are the only thing the present age achieves, and its skill and virtuosity entirely consist in building enchanting illusions; its momentary enthusiasms which use some projected change in the forms of things as an escape for actually changing the forms of things, are the highest in the scale of cleverness and the negative use of that strength which is the passionate and creating energy during Revolutionary Ages. Tired by its chimeric efforts the present ages rests in perfect indolence. Its condition is like one who has just fallen asleep in the morning: first, great dreams, then laziness, and then a witty or clever excuse for staying in bed.
The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of reflection [1] or the seductive ambiguities of reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all. Vis inertiæ [2] is the foundation of the evasion and recusal (tergiversation) of the times, and every passionless person congratulates himself for being the first to discover it - and becomes, therefore, more clever. Weapons were freely given out during Revolutionary Ages [. . .] but in the present age everyone is given clever rules and calculators in order to aid one's thinking. If any generation had the diplomatic task of postponing action so that it might appear that something were about to happen, even though it would never happen, then one would have to say that our age has achieved as mightily as Revolutionary Ages. Someone should try an experiment with himself: he should forget everything he knows about the times and its relativity amplified by its familiarity, and then come into this age as if he were from another planet, and read some book, or some article in the newspaper: he will have this impression: "Something is going to happen tonight, or else something happened last night!"
A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it. A revolt in the present age is the most unthinkable act of all; such a display of strength would confuse the calculating cleverness of the times. Nevertheless, some political virtuoso might achieve something nearly as great. He would write some manifesto or other which calls for a General Assembly in order to decide on a revolution, and he would write it so carefully that even the Censor himself would pass on it; and at the General Assembly he would manage to bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled, and then everyone would placidly go home - after they had spent a very nice evening out. An enormous grounding in scholarship is alien to the youth of today, in fact, they would find it laughable. Nevertheless, some scientific virtuoso might achieve something even greater. He would draw up some prospectus outlining systematically some all-embracing, all-explaining system that he was about to write, and he would manage to achieve the feat of convincing the reader (of the prospectus) that he had in fact read the entire system. The Age of Encyclopedists is gone, when with great pains men wrote large Folios; now we have an age of intellectual tourists, small little encyclopedists, who, here and there, deal with all sciences and all existence. And a genuine religious rejection of the world, followed with constant self-denial, is equally unthinkable among the youth of our time: nevertheless, some bible college student has the virtuosity to achieve something even greater. He could design some projected group or Society which aims to save those who are lost. The age of great achievers is gone, the present age is an age of anticipators [. . .] Like a youth who plans to diligently study from September 1 for an exam, and in order to solidify his resolve takes a holiday for the entire month of August, such is our generation which has decided resolutely that the next generation will work very hard, and in order not to interfere with or delay the next generation, this generation diligently - goes to parties. However, there is one difference in this comparison: the youth understands that he is light-hearted, the present age is on the contrary very serious - even at their parties.
{36} Action and decision is as scarce in the present age as peril is absent from shallow-water paddling. But just as the adult being tossed about delightfully by the waves calls to the younger person: "Come on, just jump into the deep water" - the decision likeways, so to speak, lies within existence (but in the individual, naturally), and shouts to the younger person not yet exhausted by an excess of reflection . . .: "Come on, jump boldly in." Even if it is a reckless leap, so long as it is decisive - if if you have it in you to be a man, then the danger and life's stern judgement upon your recklessness will help you become one.
{daring} If a precious jewel, which all desired, lay out on a frozen lake, where the ice was perilously thin, where death threatened one who went out too far while the ice near the shore was safe, in a passionate age the crowds would cheer the courage of the man who went out on the ice; they would fear for him and with him in his resolute action; they would sorrow over him if he went under; they would consider him divine if he returned with the jewel. In this passionless, reflective age, things would be different. People would think themselves very intelligent in figuring out the foolishness and worthlessness of going out on the ice, indeed, that it would be incomprehensible and laughable; and thereby they would transform passionate daring into a display of skill [. . .] The people would go and watch from safety and the connoisseurs with their discerning tastes would carefully judge the skilled skater, who would go almost to the edge (that is, as far as the ice was safe, and would not go beyond this point) and then swing back. The most skilled skaters would go out the furthest and venture most dangerously, in order to make the crowds gasp and say: "Gods! He is insane, he will kill himself!" But you will see that his skill is so perfected that he will at the right moment swing around while the ice is still safe and his life is not endangered. Just like in a theatre the crowd would cheer and applaud, and go home with the great hero-artist in their midst, and honor him with a savoury banquet. Rationality had the upper hand to the degree that it transforms the task itself into an unreal feat of artifice, and reality into a theatre.[. . .]
Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection [. . .] Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others' money [. . .] These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.
{42} [. . .] But it certainly is so, that just like all increase in knowledge increases grief, likewise reflection increases it. And it certainly is so that for each singular individual and for an entire generation, no task is more difficult than to free oneself from the temptations of reflection, just because these are so dialectical, because every new ingenious invention is capabable of suddenly giving the matter at hand a new twist, because reflection is able at any moment to put things in a new light and allow one some measure of escape, because even in the final moment of reflection-decision is it possible to change everything - after one has endured far more exertions than someone quick-minded need to endure to be in the thick of it. [. . .]
{king} The established order continues, but our passionless reflection finds its satisfaction in ambiguity. No person wishes to destroy the power of the king, not at all, but if little by little it can be reduced to nothing but a fiction, then everyone would be happy to cheer the king. No person wishes to pull down the pre-eminent, not at all, but if at the same time pre-eminence could be demonstrated to be a fiction, then everyone would be happy. Everyone want to keep Christian terminology, but with the secret knowledge that it doesn't require any decision or action. And so they are unrepentant, since they have not pulled down anything. People do not desire any more to have a strong king than they do a hero-liberator than they do religious authority, for they innocently wish the established order to exist, but with reflective knowledge, more or less, of its non-existence. And one would take pride in the deception that this is irony, just as the true ironist is not exactly the secretly impassioned in a negative age (like the hero is the openly impassioned in a positive age), as the Grand Master of the past was condemned to die.
The reflective tension this creates constitutes itself into a new principle, and just as in an age of passion enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so in a passionless age of reflection envy (misundelse) [4] is the negative-unifying principle. This must not be understood as a moral term, but rather, the idea of reflection, as it were, is envy, and envy is therefore twofold: it is selfish in the individual and in the society around him. The envy of reflection in the individual hinders any passionate decision he might make; and if he wishes to free himself from reflection, the reflection of society around him re-captures him [. . .]
Envy (misundelse) constitutes the principle of characterlessness, which from its misery sneaks up until it arrives at some position, and it protects itself with the concession that it is nothing. The envy of characterlessness never understands that distinction is really a distinction, nor does it understand itself in recognizing distinction negatively, [5] but rather reduces it so that it is no longer distinction; and envy defends itself not only from distinction, but against that distinction which is to come [6].
Envy which is establishing itself is a levelling [7], and while a passionate age pushes forward, establishing new things and destroying others, raising and tearing down, a reflective, passionless age does the opposite, it stifles and hinders, it levels. This levelling is a silent, mathematical, abstract process which avoids upheavals [. . .] Levelling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless.
One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this levelling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being levelled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this levelling, but it is an abstract process, and levelling is abstraction conquering individuality. The levelling in modern times is the reflective equivalent of fate in the ancient times. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals.
Everyone should see now that levelling has a fundamental meaning: the category of "generation" supersedes the category of the "individual". During ancient times the mass of individuals had this value: that it made valuable the outstanding individual [. . .] In ancient times, the single individual in the masses signified nothing; the outstanding individual signified them all. In the present age, the tendency is towards a mathematical equality [. . .]
{59} For the levelling properly to come about a phantom must first be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage - this phantom is the public. Only in a passionless, but reflective, age can this phantom evolve, with help from the press, when this itself becomes an abstraction. In enthusiastic times, in passionate, tumultuous times, even when a people would enterain the barren desert of an idea it is to destroy everything, still there is no public. What there is, is political parties and concretion. The press will in such times take on the the character of concretion in relation to the breaking into parts. But just as idle professionals, in particular, is prone to create phantams, so will the press in an idle reflective age, when it is the only thing that, weakly, will breathe some sort of life into this sleepyness, create this phantom. The public is the actual levelling-master, rather than the leveller itself, for levelling is done by something, and the public is a huge nothing.
The public is an idea, which would never have occurred to people in ancient times, for the people themselves en masse in corpore [8] took steps in any active situation, and bore responsibility for each individual among them, and each individual had to personally, without fail, present himself and submit his decision immediately to approval or disapproval. When first a clever society makes concrete reality into nothing, then the press [9] creates that abstraction, "the public", which is filled with unreal individuals, who are never united nor can they ever unite simultaneously in a single situation or organization, yet still stick together as a whole. The public is a body, more numerous than the people which compose it, but this body can never be shown, indeed it can never have only a single representation, because it is an abstraction. Yet this public becomes larger, the more the times become passionless and reflective and destroy concrete reality; this whole, the public, soon embraces everything [. . .]
{62} [. . .] A generation, a people, a people's assembly, a socity, a man, has indeed a responsibility by being something, and can be shamed by shiftyness and unfaithfullness, but the public remains the public. A people, an assembly, a man can change in such a way that one must say: He is no longer the same. But the public can turn into exactly the opposite and still remain the same - the public. The individual is composed (in as much as it is not already composed by its own passion) if it is not destroyed, just by this abstraction and this abstract upbringing to be content, in the highest sense of religiousness, with himself and his relationship to God, instead of concurring with the public that devours all individuality's relativity and concreteness, to substitute that of concurring with one self, to instead count and count, to find rest in one self for God. [. . .]
{63} The public is not a people, not a generation, not one's era, not a community, not a society, nor these particular persons, for all these are only what they are by virtue of what is concrete. Not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. [. . .] The public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all forces, and the most quiescent. One can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and yet the public is less than a single, rather common, real individual. [. . .]
{64} The abstraction of the press (for a journal, a newspaper is no political concretion and only an individual in an abstract sense) combined with the passionlessness and reflectiveness of the age, gives birth to that abstraction's phantom, the public, which is the real leveller. [. . .] More and more individuals will, because of their indolent bloodlessness, aspire to become nothing, in order to become the public, this abstract whole, which forms in this ridiculous manner: the public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties [10]. This lazy mass, which understands nothing and does nothing, this public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about. [. . .] The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the literary scorn [11]. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. This biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and allows itself all sorts of mischief - until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. This is how the public levels. The distinguished, the stronger gets mistreated - and the dog, it remains a dog, scorned by the public. [. . .]
{68} [. . .] One can say in general of a passionless but reflective age, compared to a passionate one, that it gains in extensity what it loses in intensity. [. . .]
{68a} [. . .] as a result of knowing and being everything possible, one is in contradiction with oneself, i.e. being nothing at all. [. . .]
{77} [. . .] Everyone knows a lot, we all know what path to take and what paths can be taken, but no one will take them. [. . .]
{85} And since in this age, in which so little is actually done, such an extraordinary amount is done in the way of prophecies, apocalypses, hints, and insights into the future, there is probably nothing else for it but to join in, knowing well that I have the advantage of insolence in front of the many heavy responsibilities of issuing prophecies and warnings, that I can be certain that nobody will believe it. [. . .]