The 'crowd' is really what I have made my polemical target, and it was Socrates who taught me. I want to make people aware so that they don't waste
their lives and fritter them away… I want to call the crowd's attention to their own ruin … And if they don't want the good, I will compel them with the
use of evil. One understands me or one doesn't.
'The single individual' is the category through which, in a religious respect, this age, history, the human race must pass.
(Journals and Papers, 1847)
Kierkegaard viewed the purpose of his authorship as a form of assault against the 'crowd'. The Present Age answers the question of what
he thought was at stake in his project of writing by making the claim that the 'crowd', understood as the 'public', simply put, does not exist
(at least not in that strict and peculiar way Kierkegaard uses the word existence). "For leveling really to come about a phantom must first
be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing - this phantom is the public"(80). As the
"spirit" of leveling, the phenomenon of "the public" is that abstraction through which the individual becomes separated from the
experienced urgency of his or her own concrete existence, and, the "public" as such, can be understood as the concept marking the
"spiritless," "passionless" condition of the age. For Kierkegaard existence can only be granted to the concrete and particular experience of
being a self which recognizes itself as an activity of responsibility for meaning expressed in passionate and decisive choice (inwardness?).
Yet it is precisely the capacity for decision that the reflective age renders impotent: "… it is this urge to decision that reflection drives
away or wants to banish" with the result that the individual "suffers the consequences in the form of an dyspeptic, abnormal common
sense." His project can thus be construed as an attempt to disrupt/subvert the dispiriting effects of an abstraction that common sense has
identified with 'normal' everyday experience itself. In refusing to address a "phantom" his writing becomes a struggle to communicate
with and through the concrete experience of the single individual, that is, to communicate that reminder of our own existence. Yet, given
the imprisoning structures of reflection which have a hold on both ourselves and the age, structures which reflection itself can't "see", this
task of communication becomes a work of inordinate difficulty. (simply saying the words 'don't forget that you exist' is never adequate to
communicate the experience of existing as an individual that the word exist here connotes because this experience in all its concretion
can't become an object of thought and thus can't be translated into language in such a way that it could be directly communicated language and thought operate by means of conceptual abstraction; as a consequence, that concrete experience I have of myself as being
the lived (free?) relation to all the generalities (roles, limitations) through which I understand myself and am understood by others, can't
be effectively conceptualized. In this way, the disruptive/subversive project of the reflective tendency of the age can be seen to involve
the disruption of the limitations of language - perhaps through the skillful and manipulative undermining of the directness of language,
through disrupting the assumed relationships between author and text, reader and text, language and meaning, that which language can't
express directly, the experience of concrete subjectivity, may somehow "show" itself indirectly.)
The phenomenon of leveling has leveled the 'lived reality' of distinctions that had previously served as the framework of meaningful
experience; while the phenomenon of reflection allows everything to remain the same in appearance, appearances are depleted of intrinsic
meaning, experience itself, by becoming the living through of an abstraction, is stripped of the intrinsic meaning that is only found in its
concreteness. The result is an age of nihilism wherein relationships become based on commodity value, politics becomes
indistinguishable from entertainment, where the entire world is transformed into a theater for the purpose of entertaining that "monstrous
nothing" that is the public. I have suggested that one way to get an idea for what Kierkegaard is pointing to with the concept of a
'reflective age' is to consider the way that it is possible for what one experiences as immediately real in experience can be the result of a
theoretical abstract position that has become sedimented into our everyday experiences of ourselves and the world in such a way that it is
no longer recognized as being the abstract position that it is. The rise of the modern scientific point of view theoretically posited a split in
experience (think of Descartes' mind/body dualism) that eventually came to structure experience itself. Essential to this view is the idea
that what is 'most real' is the quantifiable, that is, that which can be measured. Thus the objective world is taken to be comprised of
measurable objects; everything else, including the experience of values and meaning, is taken to be 'less real' than the quantifiable, and is
regulated to the realm of the merely subjective. When this theoretical and abstract position of reflection is appropriated into our everyday
perspectives, it becomes embodied in the unreflectiveness of common sense. When the real is not only thought to be the rational but
experienced as such, that which cannot be rendered transparent to reason, most notable here is the experience of concrete subjectivity,
gradually becomes lost to experience - hence, we forget what it means to exist. And rather than experiencing ourselves through active and
passionate struggle with decision, we become only capable of viewing ourselves from an abstract and detached point of view - we become
anonymous spectators and reality becomes a stage.
Additionally the communication of the existential subject matter, in order to hold out some hope for success in the age of leveling, must
take the form of a type of writing that actively undermines its own authority - it is authority in the sense of authoring one's experience as
one's own, uniqueness and difference, claims and acts of the excellence of the human spirit, that the envious spirit of the age can only
recognize through the act of literally leveling it down and thus making its authority ineffective. Thus Kierkegaard becomes intentionally
"unrecognizable" in order to indirectly direct the individual toward an awareness of his or her existence. "And not one of the
unrecognizables dare presume to help directly, to speak directly, to teach directly, to make the decision at the head of the crowd (instead
of helping the individual towards the decision, where he himself is, supporting him negatively" (pg. 97). But we shouldn't forget "that
reflection in, or by, itself is not something pernicious, that on the contrary its thorough working through is the condition of more intensive
action" (99). If we have lost our immediate inherence in a greater and meaningful context through reflection, perhaps an awareness of
this loss can be the occasion for a higher education/development of the individual. The public, the present age, could be "an abstraction
which in its abstract indifference, by repelling him [the individual] helps him to become wholly educated." But in what sense? And let's
not forget what is at stake here; Kierkegaard continues, "unless he is destroyed" (82).