Soren Kierkegaard

interest particularly piqued by its literary qualities so much as by the epochs
that form the background of the book: the passionately revolutionary 1790s
and the reasonable, timorous 1840s .For all its flaws and faults, Mrs .Gyllem-
bourg preferred the former of the two ages, and so did Kierkegaard, because,
as he writes in summing up the difference between them: “In general, com-
pared with a passionate age, one can say of a passionless but reflective age
thatit gains in extensity what it loses in intensity.”
The fact that the age is without passion is the negative judgment that
providesA Literary Reviewwith its polemical pulse .It is thus not surprising
that most of all it is the cautious, banal bourgeois (in a number of more or
less caricatured variants) who gets the short end of the stick, because he is
neither cold nor hot but always squeezes through some expedient loophole:
“Exhausted by chimerical exertions, the age thus rests for a moment in total
indolence .Its condition is like that of a person who is sleeping as dawn
approaches: great dreams, then torpor, then a witty or clever idea to excuse
the fact that one remains in bed.”
The self-satisfied burgher in his supine ease is the emblem of the collapse
of the vertical dimension, the fall of all previously unshakable authorities,
religious as well as political .The center is now everywhere .Unlike the age
of revolution, when the various embodiments of authority were openly and
consciously denounced, the age of reasonableness is characterized by the
gradual hollowing-out of the legitimacy of institutions and the substance of
symbols: “People do not want to abolish the monarchy, by no means .But
if little by little they could transform it into an imaginary notion, then they
could gladly shout, Hurrah for the King!.. .They wish to permit the con-
tinued existence of the whole of Christian terminology while being covertly
of the opinion that nothing decisive is in fact meant by it.” The reader
is almost tempted to believe that Kierkegaard’s diagnoses of the age are
postmodern, long before it became modern to be postmodern.
Kierkegaard was one of the first to see how everything was becoming
increasingly theatrical and was thus being transformed into stage sets, exter-
nality, kitsch, a “mirage.” Society no longer consisted of individuals or
groups divided into a social hierarchy; no, it consisted of an undifferentiated
mass, “the public.” With frightening clairvoyance, Kierkegaard called the
phenomenon of the public “the most dangerous of all powers and the most
insignificant.” The most dangerous because it will march as soon as some-
one says “March!” and the most insignificant because it would never dream
of asking the least question, which makes its power more or less proportion-
ate to its anonymity.
Kierkegaard’s analyses of the public as the great “master of leveling” con-
stitute a brilliant outline of the mechanisms of mass psychology, but they