| on kierkegaards concept of leveling and what he means by "inwardness" as it relates to silence The idea goes, today, in the age we live in, there is not enough passion and too much reflection.
Or in other words, there is not enough action and far too much innaction. I think he uses the word reflection because it flushes the idea out better, it captures the kind of innaction that pretends to be smart, or, rationalized lazines, and in the worst kind of way because we flatter ourselves with the wit we spin to stay idle. He goes on to say that in this age without passion we've learned to secretly resent those people who are extra-ordinary. In a time of great passion, everything is torn apart, institutions are revolted against, people buldoze each other to create their own paths and leaders emerge who do amazing things, but in a time of passionless reflection, everything is left standing but is drained of its significance, everything becomes a feat of dialectics or mindless chatter. This happens because nobody acts out of passion, and everyone act instead out of a calculated fake passion and so we might applaud the apparent hero of our age, but when we get home we say "oh if i practiced enough, i could do that too" and we secretly trivialize and witticize until we might as well praise ourselves. I see it everyday in myself and its strange to agree with Kierkegaard in this respect because our culture is very much based on absolute equality of all people - He says this equality is leveling, because we secretly resent each other in our day and so no heroes are born, no institutions are destroyed and rebuilt, no progress is made. Great what does this mean then. It means, or so I think he says, that people aren't related to each other as clashing individual competing wills, rather people are related to each other by feigned polite observation. I'll continue this tomorrow.... |
