Soren Kierkegaard

also lay bare a phenomenon that has had a prominent place in our language
since the time of Karl Marx, the phenomenon of alienation .Like Marx,
Kierkegaard included a number of economic and material factors in his
analyses, but they were never connected to any pragmatic political program
and they did not tend in the direction of anything that might evenhintat
social or economic reforms .Not in 1846, at any rate .To become oneself
is an individual project, not a collective concern, which is why material
circumstances are devoid of decisive significance.
At the same time, as a consequence of the changes set in motion by the
transition from absolutism to democracy, the old fear of higher authorities
had been replaced by a fear of being different fromthe others, a fear of falling
outside the average .Previously the individual’s identity had been largely
determined by his place within the social pyramid, from the bottom of
which the dregs of society could gaze upward through the great hierarchical
structure to persons of greater and greater authority, culminating in the
king, who was a sort of earthly analogue to God and was therefore king by
the grace of God.
With the collapse of this pyramid, people were left in a flattened and
chaotic landscape, or a vacuum, where they begin to compare themselves
to one another, becoming rivals .Thus leveling did not lead to the equality
of everyone but to a cramped and crabbed pettiness, the war of all against
all: “A relationship has become a problem, in which instead of relating to
one another, the parties are wary of one another as in a game.” In short,
the place of authority has been usurped by conformism, respect has turned
into envy, and what was once fear of God has become fear of man .Kierke-
gaard makes use of a physical principle in explaining this: “Close air always
becomes noxious.”
To illustrate how the heroic loses its representative character, Kierke-
gaard presents the reader with a diptych that illustrates the same scene in
the age of passion and the age of reasonableness .A rare treasure that is “the
desire of everyone” is located so far out on thin ice that whoever goes out
to retrieve it places himself in mortal peril .But the hero, who of course
dares where others are scared, rushes off, attended by the breathless crowd
upon whose reactions Kierkegaard comments: “[The crowd] would trem-
ble for him and with him in the mortal peril of his decision; it would mourn
him in his death; it would deify him if he gained the treasure.” Then Kier-
kegaard repeats the scene, but what had previously been a breathless crowd
now becomes a spiritless public that rationally calculates the extent to which
such a feat of daring will pay off: “They would go out there .They would
stand where it was safe and sound, and putting on the airs of experts, they
would evaluate the skillful skaters who could skate almost to the outermost