Soren Kierkegaard

oneself had nothing to do with the surrounding society or with the changes
that were taking place .On the contrary, the close connection between one’s
self and one’s surroundings can be seen in a series of journal entries from
1847 in which Kierkegaard comments on “natural science,” assigning it the
following report card: “Of all the sciences, natural science is the most vapid,
and it has amused me to consider how year after year something that once
caused astonishment becomes trivial... .What excitement was aroused by
the use of the stethoscope! Soon we will have come to the point that every
barber uses one, and after he has shaved you he will ask, Perhaps you would
also like to be stethoscoped? Then someone else will invent an instrument
for listening to the beating of the brain .It will arouse enormous excitement
until, in fifty years’ time, every barber can do it .Then, at the barbershop,
after you have had a haircut and a shave and have been stethoscoped (be-
cause by then this will be quite ordinary), the barber will ask, Perhaps you
would also like me to listen to your brain beating?”
It is clear that Kierkegaard would not have answered the barber’s question
in the affirmative .And although this prophetic vignette is characterized by
a certain “amusement,” it is also true that the merriment was accompanied
by a sense of malaise that not even grotesque and wry facial expressions could
manage to conceal .The question Kierkegaard poses to the newly shaved
and stethoscoped customer—whether he would like to have someone listen
to the beating of his brain—seems most of all to echo his fear that the natural
sciences will be increasingly capable of infringing on the integrity and self-
determination of the human person .The barber was eager and his question
was meant as a helpful service, but it seemed much more like a threat and
an intrusion .The sound of a brain beating was no longer the business of the
individual, but could now be detected by an instrument, an inanimate tattle-
tale .And beneath all the humor we notice Kierkegaard shuddering at the
thought of spirit being reduced to mechanics .In this harsh illumination,
the scene in the barbershop anticipated the clinical debates of later times
concerning the minimum criteria for the prolongation of a life in which the
only thing remaining is the infinitesimally faint beating of the brain.
In the progress of the natural sciences, Kierkegaard saw a series of tenden-
cies toward a domination by expertise that would take away the rightful
authority people have over their own persons—an all-powerful expertise
that would deprive the less knowledgeable of the right to have any say in
the matter .Increased knowledge is not necessarily accompanied by a corre-
sponding increase in justice, as is clear from the following journal entry,
which characteristically alternates between sarcasm and an emphasis on mat-
ters of principle: “The natural sciences will be the source of the most lamen-
table divide—between the simple people, who simply believe, and the