Soren Kierkegaard

incoherent and anesthetized media proletariat that deifies everything easy
and vile.
This tendency is revealed when the voice of the individual disappears
into the chattiness of the age .People neither speak nor remain silent .They
do something in between, they chatter .“In this chatter the distinction be-
tween the private and the public is abolished in a private-public chattiness
that roughly corresponds to what ‘the public’ is .For ‘the public’ is the
public sector that takes an interest in what is most private.” And it was
in connection with this anonymous chatter that the idea of a far-reaching
“speaking tube” presented itself to Kierkegaard as the most frightful symbol
of modern times .In a terrifying vision of the audiovisual chaos of a future
time, when the earth would be surrounded by satellites circling through the
atmosphere, Kierkegaard prophetically proclaimed: “And just as the public
is a sheer abstraction, in the end human speech will also become an abstrac-
tion .No one will speak any more, but in time an objective reflection will
emit an atmospheric something or other, an abstract sound that will make
human speech superfluous, just as machines have made laborers superfluous.
In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers, so the whole business
will probably end with a loving couple sitting and talking to each other
anonymously.”
What Kierkegaard here sensed as a premonition was that the voice for
which he understood himself to be a humble speaking tube—the voice of
God—would fade into the impersonal chattiness of modern speaking tubes.
This was the innermost theme of his critique of his own and of future times.
Our own day’s enormous supply of both speaking and picture tubes has
demonstrated with more clarity than we might want that Kierkegaard’s con-
cern was justified .For it was not only the rampant cheapening of everything
that alarmed Kierkegaard, but also the absence of the eternal from the
human horizon, the loss of the possibility of a radically new departure, the
loss of the true destiny of man .One spring day in 1845 he exemplified this
point by sketching the following grotesque scene: “You are standing as if
on the summit of the Mount of the Transfiguration and must depart—but
then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the green-
grocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result
is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount
of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill.”
Nor did Kierkegaard have any particular confidence that his critical appeal
to his times would be heard, much less have any effect .“I think,” he had
Climacus write in theConcluding Unscientific Postscript, “that trying to restrain
one’s times in straightforward fashion is like when a passenger in a carriage