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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.

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Unamuno, Miguel de. The Tragic Sense of Life. New York: DoverPublications, 1954. Print.