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Speech Amid the Chatter: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Existentially Impoverished
Communication
Introduction
This modern massified and anonymized world has been
critiqued for creating an environment that fails to address
existential issues (such as particularity and mortality) that
concern the concrete individual. Moreover and more importantly,
rather than merely failing to treat these highly personal
concerns (as a mass society by its very definition may not be
capable of treating such concerns) it is not uncommon to hear the
claim that, in general, modern members of society are by
seemingly incapable of communicating about issues of existential
relevance. Perhaps in looking back at some concerns of a few
early members of the “existentialist tradition” a more contoured
understanding of the condition of the modern self can be
attained.
In analyzing the nature of interpersonal communication as a
method of assessing society more broadly Kierkegaard and
Heidegger were able to shed light on the nature and symptoms of
existential impoverishment in the modern world. While
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Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication and his diatribes
against anonymity in media (as exemplified by the Corsair Affair)
have been well studied and dissected, this paper will consider a
less discussed passage in The Present Age. It will consider the
Kierkegaardian concepts of “leveling” and “authenticity” in the
context of the modern world and describe how modern communication
in its very essence and philosophical underpinning undermines the
ability for authenticity (more generally) and authentic
communicative relationships (more specifically) to exist and
develop.1 Concerns similar to Kierkegaard’s will then be shown
to echo across Heidegger’s more descriptive assessment of the
nature of modern communication by presenting three terms that he
introduced in part 8 of Being and Time.
Kierkegaard’s Passionate Annulments
In The Present Age Kierkegaard presents a series of
“annulments” that represent the elimination of “passionate
1 Kierkegaard tends to fall into a type of solipsism when describing the authentic self, and in so doing largely fails to address the issue of intersubjectivity. This tendency of Kierkegaard’s in described by Levinas andothers. However this paper will generally consider authenticity in the ways that Kierkegaard and Heidegger think of it, and will not take this as an opportunity (albeit tempting) to critique Kierkegaard and Heidegger in terms of more contemporary understandings of the self.
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disjunctions” from the life of the individual in an age of
reflection. His first annulment - and the one that serves as the
primary inspiration for this paper - is: “What is it to chatter?
It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being
silent and speaking.”2 Kierkegaard uses this same linguistic
formulation repeatedly (with only the words in the place of
“chatter,” “silent” and “speaking” changing each time) to
describe his understanding of other ideas pertinent to his
critique, such as formlessness, superficiality, philandering, and
loquacity.3
The removal of passionate disjunctions in life impairs the
existential self-understanding of the individual in at least two
ways, and hints at a critical fault that Kierkegaard observed in
the nature of his social reality.
The first relates to the Hegelian (originally Parmenidean)
hypothesis that thought equals being and being equals thinking.
Kierkegaard’s Climacus spends time in Concluding Unscientific Postscript
ridiculing this “fantastic” position. “Speculative thought
2 Two Ages pg. 973 Two Ages 100, 102, 102, and 103, respectively.
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repeatedly attempts to reach reality within its own domain,
assuring us that whatever is thought is real, that thought is not
only capable of thinking reality but of bestowing it, while the
truth is the direct opposite.”4 Climacus, rather than relying on
abstract thought to bestow reality, describes the real as the particular.
This position is consistent with Kierkegaard’s general view that
the self is defined by concrete actions, expressions, and beliefs
through which one manifests oneself in the world, and in so doing one
actively creates their identity over time. But Kierkegaard saw
the trend of Enlightenment modernity as moving towards a social
rationalization that attempted to contain the self within
progressive and abstract categories.
Kierkegaard’s view of authentic selfhood holds that one only
realizes themselves as particular by way of attaining self-
knowledge, and self-knowledge can only be realized by
capabilities commensurate with particularity, such as the ability
to make passionate commitments and private choices. It follows,
then, that passion is co-formative with authentic being; it
represents the extrication of the self from the crowd. As a
4 Concluding Unscientific Postscript pg. 283
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person becomes more passionate, they liberate themselves from the
ontological neutralization that Kierkegaard thinks to be a
fabrication of modernization.5 To become an individual one must
free themselves from the “web of reflection” that inevitably
enfolds them in social, philosophical, economic, and political
abstractions. In breaking free they can then achieve ontological
positivity (particularity). Instead of seeing themselves only in
terms of what they see in others, they leap out to themselves as
the distinct “me.” However, if a person never comes to a point
in which they can communicate internally in an authentic self-
relation, they certainly would never be able to communicate about
issues authentically with others. When passion is annulled in
society’s leveling down the self in encouraged to drop to its
lowest form; it dissolves and becomes an abstract amalgam of
objective and unappropriated thought-categories. In a
philosophical context, the leveled person is roughly approximate
to the self described in the Enlightened theory of identity
described by Hume in his (soon abandoned) Bundle Theory. That
5In The Tragic Sense of Life Unamuno describes the abstracted man in a way strikinglysimilar to how Kierkegaard might have described his peers: “A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.”
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is, they are a merely the sum total of instances of experiences
but otherwise lacking an internal continuous identity. For
Kierkegaard the authentic individual possesses an “individual
philosophy of life” that transcends mere experience and colors
the total project of life.6
The second way is motivated by the rejection of the
principle of contradiction. Kierkegaard identified this
rejection as a result of Hegel’s ambitious attempt to resolve the
problem of contradiction by absorbing it into a higher unity.7
“The present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion
and therefore it has nullified the principle of contradiction.”8
The principle – which states that two contradictory statements
cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time – is 6 See “From the Papers of One Still Living” in which Kierkegaard says “[A life-view] is more than a compendium or a sum of positions, maintained in its abstract impersonality; it is more than experience, which is as such always atomistic; it is in fact the transubstantiation of experience, it is an unshakable sureness in oneself, won from all experience.... If we are asked how such a view of life comes to be acquired, we answer that for him who does not allow his life to fritter away completely, but seeks as far as possible to turns itsindividual expression inwards again, there must of necessity come a moment in which a strange illumination spreads over life.” (p. 77)7 Kierkegaard’s authorship is largely an affirmation of logical formalism. Either/Or is an expression of the truth of the principle of contradiction. But in the Postscript (pg. 304) Kierkegaard says that for the Hegelian philosopher the principle had become so corroded that it had become “a favorite sport thatas soon as anyone hints at an aut-aut (either/or), Hegelians have been on the warpath.”8 Two Ages pg. 68
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necessary to Kierkegaard’s theory of passionately informed
identity. Removing the principle of contradiction delegitimizes
qualitative expressions of passion, which effectively erases the
delineations of particularity. More towards the point of this
paper, Kierkegaard criticized Hegel for abrogating this principle
because removing it, he thinks, undermines all affected human
relationships and renders them foundationally inert.
The essence of leveling resides in a denial of the
possibility of contradiction and dissent. Denying this
possibility by denying the principle prevents the emergence of
qualitatively distinguishing relationships between and among
particulars. Rather, it embeds all people in a perpetually
flattened state of abstract egalitarianism. Kierkegaard rejects this
type of egalitarianism because it promotes an essentialism that
negates the significance of passions and actions, and in
consequence meaningful relationships (which are predicated on
such honest passions) are lost. “The coiled springs of life-
relationships, which are what they are only because of
qualitatively distinguishing passion, lose their resilience; the
qualitative expression of difference between opposites is no
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longer the law for the relation of inwardness to each other in
the relation.”9
Instead of operating in a relation of inwardness, the
freshly leveled opposites now can do no more than step back and
observe one another in an “uncoiled” relation. This state of
reflective observation effectively signals the termination of the
authentic relation between individuals and identifies the
beginning of the absorption into a passionless bundle of
indistinct entities, what Kierkegaard calls “the crowd.” The
leveled person is rendered incapable of communicating a positive
or negative truth because the principle that grounds the
possibility for either has been cut away at the root. In a
society that has eliminated this fundamental principle of
identity one becomes neither this person nor that person, all
persons are merely instantiated reflections of the general
public.10
Kierkegaard, in his fashion, presents the general concept
of “the present age” dialectically rather than historically, and
9 Two Ages pg. 7810 Ibid. 97
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as such his writings from mid-18th century Copenhagen are germane
to any place at any time that exists outside of passion. The
spirit of leveling is the dialectical opposite of the spirit of
passion, a spirit that was present (in different forms) in
ancient times and in times of authentic Christianity. It comes
upon society as a “demonic” spirit controlled by no one; it
combats passion abstractly by internalizing a general aura of
complacency. Unless consciously rejected, it remains. When this
devilish spirit is accepted by a society it saps the existential
positivity from the people and replaces it with neutral
substitutes that, like an oversized toupée, overcompensates in an
attempt to cover over what has been lost.
The public in a leveled age is prone to chattering more than
in a passionate age, but what it gains in the breadth of
communication is loses in depth.11 Intensity is substituted for
extensity. Information and meaning (the two elements transmitted
in communication) are neutralized in the age of reflection while
existential life-issues are approached present-at-hand, curious
11 Heidegger takes this form of relation a step further (as we will see later)and states that we, as whole beings, simultaneously fall into a state of frenzied busyness and existential emptiness.
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vestiges of a bygone era of sincere passions. Rebellion and
dissent are snuffed before they start because no one cares enough
to do either.
After annulling the disjunction between speaking and silence
a relentless chatter ensues that functions defensively to block
out the possibility of experiencing the emptiness left from the
absence of inwardness. For “silence is the essence of
inwardness, of the inner life.”12 Chatter as described by
Kierkegaard is a transmutation of the desire to avoid the anxiety
that results from existential self-knowledge. In what whatever
form and regardless of its content, it fears silence because
silence reveals the tension of having self-consciousness while
lacking self-identity. Even more extreme, and perhaps at the
risk of overreaching, it fears silence because it fears what
stilled and quiet personal thoughts sometimes evoke: thoughts of
mortality and death. There is no care or desire to build a
passionate relationship between persons – a relationship that
transcends the rationality of simple “functionality” - there is
rather an unvoiced and at most semiconscious desire to distract
12 Two Ages pg 97
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oneself from having to think about the question of meaningfulness
in relation to oneself and the lives of others. Chatter is the
result of unanimous participation something similar to Becker’s
“immortality projects” (which were, of course, largely inspired
by Kierkegaard) in that it attempts to overcome the awareness of
personal mortality by implicitly encouraging an individual’s
absorption within existentially irrelevant information.13 Silence
in an age of dispassion demolishes the unfounded self. On the
contrary, silence in an age of passion is filled with the
ceaseless activity of inwardness.
A passionate individual is not disturbed by the silence in
the crowd because the individual does not need the crowd to know
who they are or what they ought to be doing with their life. The
dreaded lull in conversation that exists only for those who
depend on the dull roar of the crowd – the “awkward silence” –
does not disturb the single individual from his ongoing project
of self-understanding. He has an infinite internal reservoir to
sustain himself. Conversely, the abstracted away member of the
13 “At A Graveside” by Kierkegaard, “The Denial of Death” by Becker, and Being-towards-death in Heidegger describe how we talk about death in such a way as to take flight from the acute consciousness of our own mortality.
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crowd withers away as his vicarious basis of perceived “meaning”
in existence fades into silence.
Heidegger’s Groundless Discourse
In Being and Time Heidegger identifies discourse as a primary
aspect of Being. However, rather than reducing discourse to
language alone, he identifies discourse as the ontological
condition of language. He describes the affliction of discourse
as a fundamental affliction of Dasein that precedes language as
it appears in the mode of everydayness. Kierkegaard and
Heidegger similarly apprehend the ontological diffusion of the
self in society – what can be called the “public nature” of
modern life - as leading to an inauthentic lostness in Being.
While the similarities of their thought on this issue is
remarkable, it is not possible to know if Heidegger read The
Present Age as his references to Kierkegaard are brief and far
between, although the commonalities alone are almost enough to
suggest that he had.
To approach discourse as a subject of existential inquiry
Heidegger describes the nature of communication as it appears in
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daily life. The three major categories that he first introduces
in Part 8 of Being and Time are Idle Talk, Curiosity, and
Ambiguity.
"Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up, it not
only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but
develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which
nothing is closed off any longer."14 “Idle” refers to a state of
inactivity, and within that inactivity is a suggestion of an
untapped potential activity. That which can be potentially
activated (but as of yet remains latent) is an engagement with
the essential subjective rootedness of authentic Being that
discloses itself in genuine self-understanding. Idle talk merely
masquerades as understanding – it has access to everything on an
external level but does not emphasize an active personal
appropriation of its content. It is never understanding proper
insofar as the understanding it reflects cannot be described as
“mine.” A dialogue occurring between two in the form of idle
14 For Heidegger language is helpful insofar as it allows people to communicate about subject about which they are not familiar with on a firsthand basis; it is harmful insofar as it can mire people in a web of publicness and prevent them from genuinely understanding something themselves.Being and Time pg. 213
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talk is eternally mired in a web of external referentiality - a
rationalistic categorical containment - thus the dialogue is
never really regarding either person present. Knowledge in idle
talk is pre-classified as something “out there” that can only be
passively related to in an inert cohesion. This relationship
model, as shown by the earlier work of Kierkegaard, results from
the loss of active particularity brought about by the loss of
thoughts of incompatibility and internal contradiction. Active
engagement is only a latent possibility of Being that, in its
essential nature, requires an inward vitalization. This requires
the self to fall back on its mortal self-determining essence by
way of existential invigoration, but this project of self-
realization is the project that idle talk rests in basic
opposition to. The idle talk of the crowd discourages the
participant from “owning” their identity, and as “ownership” of
oneself is the hallmark of authenticity idle talk prevents
authenticity from being an achievable point.
Curiosity, the second mode of inauthentic approach to
discourse, is remarkably similar to Kierkegaard’s concept of
reflection. An example of curiosity might be a student who pokes
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and prods and “understands” a cadaver yet never seriously
considers death as a reality in the horizon of their own life.
He and his instructor discuss the mechanics, form, and physiology
of the body, and the student asks questions because he is
“curious” about the subject. While this student is closely
involved with death as a category of understanding the world out
there, he never realizes “death” in a close, personal sense.
Death is placed in a category – “people die.” But “people” as an
abstraction never includes “I.” Swallowed in a fatalism
(Kierkegaard calls fate the correlative to leveling15) that
“realizes he is merely a fraction in something utterly trivial”
the reflector develops an opposition to considerations of himself
as self-conscious spiritual self.16 He becomes absorbed by mere
temporal novelty.17 Curiosity is a restless force that wants to
see everything, but it does not take care with anything. It is a
diffusion of interest among anything that comes along, and in so
doing it is a flight from ever dwelling within any specific
identity or worldview. The curious person may meet someone, but
15 Present Age pg 8416 Ibid. 8517 Kierkegaard remarks that if everything occurring at present were spoken of as if it were 50 years ago nobody would be interesting in it.
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he is never there with them in a spiritual comingling. Rather,
the curious person is there with an objectified person who, is
their essentialist reduction, stands-in as a representative of
novelty.18
In his description of Being-towards-death (in which the
influence of Kierkegaard can most clearly be seen) Heidegger
describes how language, when used as a disinvested tool for the
transfer of information, often effectively obfuscates the subject
which it attempts to bring into focus. Kierkegaard’s “At a
Graveside,” the final part of Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions,
resonates across the landscape of Heidegger’s view of death and
death-consciousness. They both emphasize the immensely difficult
task of becoming co-present with death. The way in which the
mass of people generally speak, which is in the outer language of
they-ness, subtlety displaces its object in relation to its
subject; authentic Being-towards-death calls itself out of its
“they-self.” The “they-self” is neither you nor I, it is an
abstracted conceptual category of what “one” does. Someone in
18 Kierkegaard and Heidegger both have much to say about the crisis of objectification, and that would certainly make an interesting future paper topic, especially in light of their own personal shortcomings in this matter.
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inauthentic Being-towards-death, like the previously mentioned
medical student, casually talks about how “everyone dies”
dismissively, as it is no more than an objective fact about the
world. However, they never reach the point of realizing that
they too will absolutely cease to be. Ambiguous and
dispassionate language is not conducive to the harboring of the
existential knowledge of death. Ambiguity never claims the “I,”
and dispassion never allows the “I” to be experienced.
In other locations Heidegger declares that the proper
attunement for communicating philosophical ideas meaningfully –
that is, in a state of “wonder”19 – has been replaced by
curiosity.20 It is an insidious force that creeps in under the
guise of significant knowledge. The death of wonder is a result
of the onset of Enlightenment’s rational enframing (regarding all
things as a “standing reserve” of resources to be exploited) as
19 Kierkegaard speaks on the concept of “wonder” in Philosophical Fragments in a way roughly similar to the way in which Heidegger used the term. Kierkegaard’s wonder basks in the paradoxical beauty of the incarnation – the impossible beauty of the clash of the infinite and the finite – and in this mode incomprehensibly nourishes the freedom to believe or not believe, a freedom tortuous as well as paramount to Kierkegaard. As Kierkegaard states in a 1954 journal entry – “it is man’s duty to know that which he cannot understand.”20 Heidegger’s 1938 lectures published as Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” develop his discussion of curiosity presented in Being in Time.
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modernity’s primary mode of Being. To make a rough analogy
across Heidegger and Kierkegaard’s disparate vocabularies,
enframing is to curiosity as fate is to leveling.
Ambiguity, his third term, identifies the downfall of
particularity by way of placing knowing in the arena of the
“they” - das Man. Everyone knows knowledge as it is given but not
as one gains it. It is a passive process. The “they” takes
whatever is presented to them and banters around with it until
the next movement of thought comes around. Ambiguous hordes do
not care about what they are agreeing with so long as they have
something with which to identify. The collective identity
revolves around common knowledge – it represses dissenting ideas
in order to allow the univocal to reign supreme. One implicitly
consents to ambiguity as a mode of Being when they choose to be
indifferent to life-issues in the task of foregoing existential
anxiety. In the midst of an ambiguous crowd an effectively
challenging voice would force individuals to fall back towards a
personal ground and cobble together an individuating life-
perspective from which to address the challenge. In driving one
towards the foundation of their essential existence this pushes
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one further back to the basis of their existence; it forces one
to consider the nature of being alive and what that means for who
they are. This pushing of one back onto an acute self-awareness
is precisely that which these three modes Heidegger introduced
seek to repress and cover over, and as such they are generally
stifled.
Living Silence
Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian thoughts on discourse and
existential authenticity point in a similar direction – a
socially clouded sense of self-identity obstructs the ability to
passionately acquire the ability for self-knowledge and thus
prevents one from being able to sustain a personal identity. The
ability to self-identity is handicapped in its formative state by
social ideas of abstract egalitarianism, which in its structural
paradigm discourages individuals from nurturing robustly
impassioned identifies in order to preserve a comfortable
collective identity. Passion is the source of identity
differentiation, and passion exists in opposition to enframed
objectivity. Kierkegaard describes how abstract egalitarianism
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achieves dominance by corroding the principle of non-
contradiction, and in so doing dissolves people’s ability to
discern opposites or appropriate their own particular identity.
Mutual exclusives are denied in favor of abstract unification.
Communication is de-individuated and thus takes place with little
to no existential force, and authentic relationships are never
able to form.
People become abstract, ungrounded, and uprooted. They
float away and are absorbed into the crowd – the larger uprooted
collective. The crowd sustains itself in uprooted activities –
busyness and chatter – whatever it might be that keeps them at a
distance from the authentic ground of individual existence. In
this environment communication never makes it to the
existentially relevant stage because that violates its protective
function.
Chatter fears the silence because silence puts the whole
charade into relief and reveals what chatter intends to hide.
What Heidegger calls “reticence” – keeping silent – is a mode of
Being that grounds the self by removing the self from the
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ungrounded “they.”21 Silence brings out the harbinger of
authenticity - anxiety in the face of freedom and mortality - and
thus in the modern communicative mode is instinctively resisted.
Thus, a fear of silence may perhaps be indicative of an
existentially dead society that shares the same original fear of
particularity, death, and death consciousness. But for the one
who can sustain himself inwardly and independently of the noise
of the crowd (or at least for Kierkegaard) “what is the
intoxicating content of the glass but a drop compared with the
infinite sea of silence from which I drink!”22
21 Being and Time 6822 Stages on Life’s Way 18
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References
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free PressPaperbacks, 1997. Print
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of“Logic.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial,2008. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to PhilosophicalFragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Philosophical Fragments. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1993. Print.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Two Ages. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1978. Print.