Why You Hate The Modern World | Kierkegaard's The Present Age

The Present Age

The present age is the age of

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Have you ever felt that the modern world

is sort of empty in a way that is

difficult to define? You trudge along in

your day-to-day existence, but it all

has an underlying pointlessness to it.

It is like you are watching yourself

just get through life without ever truly

engaging with it. Philosophers have

given this problem a whole host of

analyses over the past two centuries.

From political thinkers criticizing our

economic organization to spiritual

leaders encouraging us to take back a

sense of wonder in the world. No doubt

they each have their own insights and

ideas to add. But today I want to

examine how the Danish philosopher

Saurin Kagard criticized the direction

in which his society was turning and how

his words may be even more relevant now

than they were in 19th century

Copenhagen. In his brilliant essay on

the present age, Kkagard predicts with

startling precience the general malaise

many today report feeling about their

lives. And I cannot wait to look at this

with you. Get ready to learn the dangers

of public life. How too much information

may be a bad thing and so much more. As

always, be aware that this is just my

flawed and incomplete interpretation of

Kicker Godard's words and to use these

ideas to aid in your own thinking rather

than just absorbing them uncritically.

But with that out of the way, let's get

A Passionless Present

started. One, a passionless present. An

awful lot of philosophy over the years

has been written in criticism of the

passions. That unstable part of us that

can gift incredible energy, animism, and

will, but at the same time is prone to

illogicality, unpredictability, and

flights of fancy. The Stoics often

viewed passion as outright dangerous and

said that it prevented us from living in

accordance with perfect and universal

reason. Plato said that a perfect

society would fight against the

passions, while the rule of St. Benedict

encouraged us to trade in our own

unstable wills for obedience if we

wanted to become true monastic

Christians. And it is perfectly

understandable why so many have feared

the passionate nature of humankind. At

its worst, passion can lead to atrocious

crimes, societal collapse, and personal

misery. If we simply gave in to wherever

our passions led us, we would likely

destroy ourselves and those around us in

the process. However, Kagard argued that

the flip side of this situation would be

just as bad. That having no passion at

all would not only be damaging socially,

but would also leave us without the

special ingredients that make life worth

embracing rather than simply enduring.

Think about it this way. A passionate

person could commit a murder. But they

could also devote their entire life to

study or become a phenomenal artist.

Isaac Newton experienced such passion

for his field that he reportedly devoted

over 10 hours a day to natural

philosophy. Leonardo da Vinci was said

to be so in love with his work that he

could always be found writing, painting,

or at his workshop. And passion is not

just useful in the hands of a genius.

The person devoted to train spotting or

Dungeons and Dragons or dinner parties

is still reaping the rewards of passion.

For Kagard, passion seems to be a

cluster concept around which a myriad of

other properties are associated. Passion

is decisive. It stems from a strong

individual outlook and can coalesce

around an idea or set of ideas. He

characterizes the revolutionary age as

one filled to the brim with passion

almost overflowing with it. So Kagard

might say the French Revolution was

passionate because it was decisive

energetic action around an idea. Of

course this is not to say that passion

is always a good thing. Kagard says if

we have passion without inward-looking

then we can fall into disastrous

results. As he puts it, when individuals

relate to an idea merely on mass, that

is without the individual inward

directedness singling out, we get

violence, unruliness, and unbridledness.

This touches upon a key theme in much of

Kkagard's philosophy, a deep skepticism

around crowd actions. Put a pin in that

as we're going to come back to it later.

If we have a group of considered

passionate individuals who each

independently subscribe to an idea, then

we're on to something really quite

special. That is the recipe for some

serious action in service of a carefully

constructed philosophy. But this passion

is the very thing Kagard sees dying from

modern pressures. He describes our era

as an age of reflection. We are used to

considering reflection as a good thing.

But Kagard thinks it can be taken much

too far. Specifically, he is worried

about the effect this lack of passion

and abundance of reflection will have on

our existential development. An idea

underlying a lot of Kkagard's work is

commitment. This is a complicated

notion, but to simplify it is the

ability to shut out the vast majority of

possibilities in our lives and focus

instead on a few key things that really

matter. So, a priest might be able to

put aside any wish for fame and fortune

and hone in on their relationship with

their god. Or a revolutionary might

devote their entire life to a key idea,

exalting this above all else. A parent

might decide that their family means the

world to them while a lover might show

absolute unwavering commitment to their

partner. Understood in this way,

commitment can come in all shapes and

sizes, even if Kikagard favors a

theological one. If someone cannot do

this, then they risk floundering in a

despair of possibility. This is a theme

Kagard touches upon both in the sickness

unto death and in either or. Someone

desparing from possibility is caught in

existential indecision. They see the

long road of life stretching ahead of

them, and they don't know what to do

with that. They flit from one shallow

activity to the next, never being bold

enough to plunge into a single path. As

a result, their life slowly ticks away,

and an emptiness takes hold of their

heart. They know they are wasting time,

but they don't even know what it would

look like not to waste time. They lack

the ability to give their utmost

commitment and faith to a single route.

This, according to Kagard, is what

happens when passion leaves us. We

become embroiled in the existential

equivalent of situationships, unable to

settle down with an idea long enough to

find it meaningful and motivating. This

is the rather terrifying effect of a

lack of passion. And Kagod says that our

rage is dooming us to these empty lives.

But what is the cause of this

passionlessness? And how can we stop it

from robbing us of a meaningful

existence? Well, Kagard's answers are

both surprising and terrifyingly

relevant. If you want to help me make

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in the description. Two, information

Information Overload

overload. Do you ever feel like there is

an overwhelming amount of information to

take in on a daily basis? We might in a

single hour check the news, see what our

friends are up to on social media, read

an opinion piece, crack open a magazine,

and become angry at a tweet. This in

turn has spawned thousands of blog posts

and think pieces on how we are just too

overloaded with inputs to sift through

it all and decide what really matters to

us. In his own time, Kagard faced a very

similar issue but on a much smaller

scale. He was concerned with how the

newspapers and magazines of Denmark

would affect our ability to take

committed singular action in our lives.

In an incredibly prophetic 1997 paper

entitled Kkagard on the internet, Hubert

Strafer splits Kkagard's critique of

information overload into two distinct

characters. We will call them the

passive observer and the commitment

addict. The passive observer is the

person who surveys all the information

available to them and yet cannot commit

to any of it, even a little bit. They

see too many issues of importance, too

many sets of actions they could take,

and can't decide on anything in

particular to focus on. Paralyzed by

this, they limit themselves to simply

commenting on events. Rather than take

committed action in the world, they pass

their self-evidently important judgments

on every major issue of the day, and

even many of the minor ones. They may

even trick themselves into thinking they

are doing something worthwhile, but

afterwards, they will look back at all

their comments and realize that they

amounted to n. Even worse, they become

more concerned with the aesthetics of

ideas than their contents. So, they are

not even devoted to a search for truth,

but simply seeking to be the cleverest

person in their local coffee shop. They

may not know anymore whether their

statements are ironic or sincere because

their actions are completely

uncorrelated with what they say. This is

the person with a total absence of

commitment. and Drafus cleverly links

them to the aesthetic stage of life

Kagard talks about in other works where

people pursue pleasure and distraction

rather than finding stable meaning in

their lives. The passive observer is

just distracting themselves with

information rather than with partying or

drinking. Next, Drafus talks about the

commitment addicts. This is a very

different reaction to information

overload, but it ends with the same

inaction that the passive observer had.

The commitment addict is someone that

cannot tear themselves away from an

important issue. So they attempt to

commit to them all. And they truly do

care about each and every cause that

comes their way. One moment they might

be absorbed with the water crisis, the

next with malaria and then with some

aspect of electoral politics. However,

all of this commitment means that they

eventually just burn out or they cannot

devote a meaningful amount of time and

energy to any of the causes that they

feel so strongly about. And this does

not just apply to the social or

political spheres. This commitment

addiction can hold just as much for the

person who wants to learn everything,

committing to subject after subject

until eventually they realize that they

never discovered that much about

anything. In any case, the commitment

addict becomes just as paralyzed as the

passive observer, either just from sheer

exhaustion or despair when they realize

that they will forever fall short of

their own commitments no matter how hard

they try. In both cases, we again see

the issues found from an excess of

possibility. There are just too many

options, too much information out there.

And as a result, we become totally

indecisive. Both the passive observer

and the commitment addict are robbed of

the privilege of devoting themselves to

a stable meaning. And Kagard thinks this

is an important component of a

fulfilling life. This is partly why he

thinks a belief in God is a good route

out of existential despair. He holds

that a true Christian must take a leap

of faith to trust in God wholeheartedly,

knowing that that is to a large extent

irrational. He must give God his

unconditional devotion, commitment

without caveat. Of course, I am not a

Christian, so I don't apply this

framework to God in particular, but I do

think that Kagard is on to something

with this notion of faith and the

importance of some of our commitments

having very few conditions. Existential

despair often consists of a feeling that

there is little points to our actions,

thoughts, emotions, or decisions. We

could get out of bed today, or we could

lie there and rot. Who cares? It won't

change anything. And I think that

Kicker's idea of faith provides a really

nice inverse of this state. For him, the

truly religious person would always have

something to appeal to to make their

life meaningful because they have a

total and unreserved commitment to an

idea or a god. And this makes every

moment of their lives have value. It's

also worth noting here that Kagod

thought most Christians did not truly

have faith in this sense and that it was

a rare quality to find even amongst the

devout. But whether you think this sort

of radical commitment is your route out

of existential problems, Kagard

highlights something incredibly

worthwhile here. When we are bombarded

with so much information, it is very

easy to lose ourselves in indecision.

And this would be a crying shame because

committed action is what makes a lot of

people's lives worth living. And total

paralysis often leaves misery in its

wake. We now face levels of information

overload Kicker Guard could only dream

of. So how are we going to deal with it?

But the worst is yet to come. Now we

will examine the effects Kagard thinks

this passionless excess of information

will have at the societal level. And

some of it will look disturbingly

familiar. Three, the pitiles public. A

The Pitiless Public

lot of ink has been spilled in recent

years over stochastic encouragements to

violence. These are situations where no

one directly calls for someone to attack

another person or organizes a mob or

forms a militia, but instead whole

masses of people mutually create the

conditions where such events are very

likely to occur. Sometimes without even

knowing it, then responsibility is

spread so thin amongst thousands and

thousands of people that who knows who

to blame. Every individual can wash

their hands of it and say that they

didn't call for anything like this to

happen. even as each one contributed in

small ways to its inevitability. It's a

bit like how in some executions by

firing squad, one of the rifles would be

loaded with a blank so that each

executioner could tell themselves that

they had the blank cartridge and so

didn't kill the prisoner. And Kagard

anticipated this stochastic phenomenon

over 150 years ago. He spends much of

his essay criticizing what he calls the

public. This is similar to an ordinary

collection of people, but is much more

abstract. It's a bit like when someone

talks about what the people are saying

or how everyone thinks this for Kagard.

One problem with the public is that it

provides people the ability to disown

their actions, remaining detached from

them and claiming they are just speaking

for the public. He specifically singles

out the press as doing this quite a lot.

This is a cover almost anyone can use

regardless of what they are arguing for.

and it allows them to avoid the risk of

actually having a judgment on an issue

or even of holding up their hands and

saying that they don't want to comment.

This all exacerbates that lack of

commitments that Kagard is so worried

about. Our opinions are no longer spoken

by us, but instead placed in the mouth

of some imaginary third party.

Additionally, Kagard is worried about

the violence and vitriol that can be

enacted by the public without any one

individual having to risk their neck. He

imagines the public as a Roman emperor

who has a pack of trusty dogs at his

beck and call. If someone displeases him

or he grows angry or just requires

momentary amusement, he can release the

hounds and watch them tear someone to

pieces. Then afterwards, he can say,

"Well, the dogs did it, not me."

Retiring to his throne with an

unblenmished conscience. If a large

enough group commits a horrific act as

one body, then each individual person

can say that they did not really hurt

anyone. or if they did, it was only

because everyone else was doing it. And

it could truly be that each individual

only committed a tiny wrong. But when

added together, these amounted to

someone's death or ruin. Kagard is

referring to smear campaigns in the

magazines and newspapers of his time.

But this is arguably even more of a risk

in the internet age. If you have

thousands of people all saying an insult

once, then no individual person has done

anything particularly major. But put all

of these tiny actions together and you

might have a full-blown harassment

campaign on your hands. And this sort of

thing has driven people to suicide on a

number of occasions. Each person can

honestly say that nothing they did

constituted harassment. They may have

left just a single cruel comment, but

together they brought about someone's

intense suffering or even their death.

This is just the sort of situation

Kickergard feared would arise from the

public. That real wrongs could be

committed without anyone bearing

responsibility for them. When we combine

this power of the crowd with the lack of

individual passion found in the present

age, we have a situation where few or no

individuals will take drastic action.

But there are these lumbering crowd

actions which lash out at anyone

differentiating themselves from the

amorphous mass that forms an abstracted

general opinion. Without passionate

individual investment in key ideas, the

crowd will not even bring about great

change as in revolutionary ages. It will

simply be an indecisive and changeable

guardian contenting itself with

trivialities. As Kagard put it, gossip

and rumor and specious importance and

apathetic envy become a surrogate for

both this and that. So Kagard paints a

dark vision of the future where the

public rules from on high with no one in

particular reaping the rewards because

the public is no one in particular. Real

existent individuals will suffer for the

continued health of a crowd that is

unpredictable, unthinking, and yet

perversely aggressive. Because the

public is not simply a collection of

individuals. It is something that each

of those individuals are attempting to

serve. And these are not simply Kagard's

elitist worries about what the unwashed

masses will do if they are given the

chance to have an opinion. The danger of

the public stretches to the very way we

relate to the world and to ourselves.

Fundamentally, Kagod is concerned about

the death of individuality. And that is

just our last point. Four, leveling and

Levelling and The Individual

the individual. Over the course of the

20th century, the anthropologist Renee

Gerard formed and refined his theory of

mometic desire. This held that many of

our wants are essentially borrowed from

the people around us. Without a proper

examination of whether achieving these

wants will make us fulfilled. So if all

our friends suddenly want fancy watches,

then we are much more likely to desire a

fancy watch. And if everyone we know is

going through breakups, we might feel a

yearning to be single ourselves. In

itself, this is not necessarily a bad

thing. It may even help us become more

socially cohesive. But Kagard was

worried about a much more sinister form

of mimisis, where our individuality is

gradually scrubbed away and we lose

everything wonderfully idiosyncratic

about our own particular existence. In

all of his religious and philosophical

thinking, Kagard remained a staunch

individualist. Not necessarily in the

political sense, but rather in the

existential one. He thought it was in

our individual relationship to God that

we could bring out everything that was

unique and precious about ourselves and

escape existential dread. This is partly

why he associates religiosity with

inwardness and self-standing. So perhaps

the most terrifying aspect of the public

for this Danish was the effect it would

have on people's self-conception. namely

that it would level us. Leveling is a

concept Kaggard uses a lot in the

present age and it's indicative of some

of his wider concerns about the

individual's ability to thrive within

modern society. Kagard says that with

our age of reflection comes a certain

objective way of looking at life. But by

objectivity, he does not just mean the

ability to see things logically, taking

all the relevant information into

account. He also meant a detachment from

our own subjectivity. that is a refusal

to value our own perspectives and what

they might tell us principally about

ourselves. Kagard thought that the

social pressures of the modern age would

lead us to seek assimilation rather than

individuality and cause us immense

distress as a result. As he put it, just

as a surf belongs to an estate, so the

individual realizes he belongs to an

abstraction under which reflection

subsumes him. In other words, he thought

we are discouraged from being

exceptional or even just individual and

instead encouraged to try and resemble

whatever the abstract public thinks in

every respect. This leveling force is

only egalitarian in the sense that it

wants to make everyone exactly the same.

Rather than give everyone the equal

chance to thrive as individuals, it

wants to sand down each person's

inconvenient edges and bumps until we

are all perfectly alike and perfectly

predictable. Importantly, Kagard is not

being conspiratorial here. He does not

think that leveling is being

orchestrated by some cabal of

anti-existentialists in long capes and

evil-looking masks. He thinks that no

individual can be the leader of

leveling, but that it stems from a

general sense of passionless envy

amongst people in the present age and

that this passionless envy in turn

stemmed from the inability to commit

ourselves to anything in our lives. It

all links together into a single

picture. This is not dissimilar to

nature's famous idea of resentment where

he says that those with less power

attempt to repress and constrain those

with more power by crafting a morality

which makes greatness itself evil.

However, whereas nature thought this was

baked into Christian ethics as early as

St. Paul, Kagard thinks this leveling is

characteristic of modernity in

particular and that our present age

either originated leveling or made it

significantly worse. It is symptomatic

of the deep suspicion of passionate

action in general, which we are

encouraged to abandon in favor of

endless reflection and discourse. The

disastrous effects of leveling only

become clear when we compare it to what

Kagard thought made an overall

fulfilling life. In the sickness unto

death, Kagard analyzes all sorts of ways

that we can become as miserable as

possible. But most of them involve some

corruption in our relationship to

ourselves. While this sounds quite

abstract, in its simplest form, it's

rather straightforward. If we don't know

ourselves, then we could spend our

entire life chasing mirages, never

knowing what we truly want. Or to use

Kagard's terminology, what we are

willing to have faith in. Kagard cares

deeply about individuality, both for its

own sake, but also because he thinks

that if we all become subsumed within

this public crowd, then we will

inevitably end up deeply unhappy. We

will fall into a kind of nihilism

because we will have ceased to view the

world through our own eyes and thus the

ability to affirm what matters to us.

Instead, we will attempt to view it

through everyone's eyes and

unsurprisingly find that no part really

matters more than any other. Bear in

mind this is a simplification of what

Kagard thinks because he also holds that

true individuality is found through a

relationship with God. This emphasis on

the individual also links back to the

theme of commitments that runs through

Kagard's essay. If we refuse to be

individuals, then we cannot give our

commitment to something as individuals.

If our only wish is to be a perfect

member of a bland public, then we will

never feel brave enough to take any sort

of leap of faith where we descend from

our comfortable reflection to engage

with the world as it is. We will remain

endlessly chatting, as Kickergard puts

it, distracting ourselves with our

public, putting forth half-considered

musings on everything from the price of

milk to the latest show at the opera

house. Then when we look back on our

lives, all we will truly be able to say

is that we were unfailingly anonymous

and unremarkable. This is the

existential horror Kagard says leveling

has in store for us. And it is a truly

terrifying thought for anyone who values

their individuality. It would be

somewhat irresponsible for me to

speculate on how relevant this final

observation is for the present day. But

I will leave it to you to decide how

much of this chimes with your experience

of the world. Do you feel the

everpresent public pressing down on you,

attempting to stifle your individuality?

If so, do you think this is a new

phenomenon? Has it got worse in recent

times? Or is this just how things have

always been, the inevitable result of

the human tendency towards conformity

that allows societies to actually

function? Do you think we are encouraged

simply to be a face in the crowd, to not

put our head above the parapets or think

for ourselves? Or do you think that this

fear is overblown? After all, in the

same essay where Kaggard talks about

this extreme conformity, he also speaks

of the newfound ability people have to

form opinions on almost everything, even

if they are uncommitted opinions. And

surely this has the potential to support

rather than oppress individual

differences. My point is I'm not saying

that Kagard's observations should be

pared uncritically. There are aspects

that are plausible and aspects that are

far less plausible. He is writing in the

mid-9th century and we live in the 21st.

But I do think that Kicker is analyzing

many of the same issues we face in our

internet age. And moreover, he is doing

so on a much smaller scale. Information

overload, being a passive spectator, and

a lack of clear direction are all

problems we face now today as a result

of our own social, political, and

philosophical pressures. And I think

that Kagard's essay is a wonderful

starting point from which we can develop

our own ideas. Who knows, we might find

out that this old Danish thinker has

spotted something about our own time

that we have missed in all the chaos.

It's certainly worth a glance if you ask

me. And if you want to look into some of

these existential issues in more detail,

then check out this video where I

attempt to make the notion of nihilism a

little bit clearer. And stick around for

more on thinking to improve your