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

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

Source: Why You Hate The Modern World | Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, Unsolicited advice, 23:48, uploaded 2024-05-11, Watch Later position 717.

The video opens with Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that the present age is an age of advertisement. Nothing seems to happen, yet instant notification never stops. That combination gives the presenter a way to describe a familiar emptiness: a person moves through daily life whilst watching themselves move, aware that something feels pointless without being able to name the missing thing.

Kierkegaard wrote The Present Age about the changing society of nineteenth-century Denmark. The video reads the essay as an early account of modernity’s malaise, then follows four connected ideas: passion, information, the public, and levelling. The presenter calls this a flawed and incomplete interpretation, and asks the viewer to use it as material for thought rather than accept it as a final account of the modern world.

Passion and the difficulty of commitment

The first section begins with philosophy’s long suspicion of passion. The Stoics treated it as a threat to reason. Plato imagined an ideal society that would restrain it, whilst the rule of Saint Benedict asked monastic Christians to exchange their unstable wills for obedience. These fears have a clear basis. Passion can produce violence, social collapse, and private misery when it runs without judgement.

Kierkegaard focuses on the cost of removing passion altogether. The same energy that could lead somebody to murder can give another person the force to spend a life studying or making art. The presenter uses Isaac Newton’s reported habit of spending more than ten hours a day on natural philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci’s absorption in writing, painting, and workshop work. Passion also gives ordinary interests their shape. A person who devotes themselves to train spotting, Dungeons & Dragons, or dinner parties can find a source of attention and pleasure that does not depend on genius.

For Kierkegaard, passion gathers several qualities around a strong individual outlook. It makes a person decisive and lets an idea become the centre of energetic action. The French Revolution serves as the video’s example of a passionate age because people acted around ideas with unusual force. Kierkegaard still qualifies the praise. Passion without inwardness, when people relate to an idea only as a mass, can produce violence and disorder. This concern with action by crowds leads into the video’s later account of the public.

The present age has a different character. Kierkegaard calls it an age of reflection, and the video treats reflection as a capacity that can grow until it prevents action. Commitment requires a person to close off most of the possibilities in life and give sustained attention to a few things that matter. A priest may set aside fame and wealth for a relationship with God. A revolutionary may put one idea above the rest. A parent may decide that their family matters more than other possible lives, whilst a lover may commit themselves to one partner.

The examples belong to different forms of life, yet they share the act of choosing a direction. Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Either/Or describe the opposite condition as despair of possibility. A person sees a long road ahead and cannot decide which way to take. They move from one shallow activity to another, postponing the moment at which one path might become meaningful. Life passes whilst they remain unsure what a life without wasted time would look like.

The presenter gives this condition a contemporary name: the existential equivalent of a series of “situationships”, in which a person stays close to an idea for too short a time to discover whether it could motivate them. The age’s lack of passion therefore leaves people with an excess of possible lives and no firm reason to choose one. The next question is what produces that excess.

Information without a direction

The video finds the first cause in information overload. A person can check the news, look at friends’ posts, read an opinion piece, open a magazine, and become angry at a tweet within a single hour. Nineteenth-century Denmark had newspapers and magazines rather than social-media feeds, although Kierkegaard already worried that a growing stream of information would weaken the ability to take singular, committed action.

The presenter attributes a useful division to a 1997 paper by Hubert L. Dreyfus, which the video calls “Kierkegaard on the Internet”. Dreyfus’s two figures are the passive observer and the commitment addict. The passive observer surveys every available issue and commits to none of them. Since every issue appears important, they respond by commenting on everything. Their judgements create the feeling of participation whilst their actions remain untouched.

The passive observer can also become more interested in the style of an idea than its truth. They want to sound clever in a coffee shop, and may lose track of whether a statement expresses a sincere belief or an ironic pose. The presenter links this to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life, in which pleasure and distraction replace a stable meaning. Information supplies the distraction that parties and drinking supplied in another setting.

The commitment addict responds to the same excess by trying to care about everything. They move from the water crisis to malaria to electoral politics, giving each cause their full emotional attention. The range of commitments eventually produces exhaustion. A person who wants to learn everything can repeat the pattern with one subject after another, discovering that they have accumulated little depth anywhere. Burnout and the awareness of falling short then lead to the same paralysis as passive observation.

Both figures suffer from too much possibility. The problem concerns attention as much as information. A person who tries to hold every issue in view cannot give enough time to one meaning for that meaning to guide their life.

Kierkegaard treats religious faith as one route out of this condition. A Christian takes a leap of faith and gives themselves to God with a commitment that accepts its own irrational element. The presenter says that they are not a Christian, yet thinks the idea of unconditional commitment identifies something real. Existential despair can make getting out of bed feel interchangeable with remaining in bed because neither choice seems to matter. A total commitment gives a person something to which each moment can answer.

The presenter also says that most Christians do not possess faith in this demanding sense, and that the quality is rare even among the devout. The point remains wider than religion. Committed action can make life feel worth living, whilst indecision can leave a person with the misery of seeing their possibilities without being able to enter one of them. The video then moves from this private paralysis to its social effects.

The public and the distribution of responsibility

Kierkegaard’s public is an abstraction formed by talking about what “the people” think or what “everyone” believes. It resembles a crowd without being a simple collection of people. Its abstraction lets individuals detach themselves from their own judgements. A newspaper can say that the public demands something, which allows the writer to speak in the public’s name whilst avoiding the risk of making a judgement as a person.

The video connects this structure to what it calls stochastic encouragements to violence. A large number of people can each make a small contribution to a harmful event without any one person directly ordering it. The presenter compares this with a firing squad in which one rifle contains a blank cartridge, allowing every executioner to imagine that somebody else fired the fatal shot. Responsibility spreads across the group until each individual can describe their own action as too small to matter.

Kierkegaard uses the press and the smear campaigns of his time as examples. The internet scales the same mechanism. Thousands of people can each leave one cruel comment, whilst the total forms a harassment campaign that causes severe suffering. The video says that such campaigns have driven people to suicide, although it gives no cases or underlying evidence for that claim. The source’s point is about cumulative harm: each small act can remain easy to excuse whilst the assembled result becomes unmistakable.

Kierkegaard imagines the public as a Roman emperor with dogs at his command. The emperor can release the dogs against a person who has caused displeasure, then return to his throne with an unblemished conscience because the dogs did the violence. The image describes the distance between the person who invokes the public and the people who carry out its aggression.

Passionless individuals and the public form a dangerous combination. The crowd lacks the sustained conviction that could produce a great change, such as the action of a revolutionary age. It still lashes out at people who stand apart from its shifting general opinion. Gossip, rumour, and an appearance of importance take the place of considered judgement. Since the public is nobody in particular, its rule gives no individual the rewards of responsibility whilst real individuals suffer when the crowd turns against them.

The presenter insists that Kierkegaard’s concern is not a simple fear of the uneducated masses. The public threatens individuality itself. That brings the argument to levelling.

Levelling and the loss of the individual

René Girard’s twentieth-century account of mimetic desire gives the video a later way to describe social imitation. People often borrow their wants from those around them without asking whether the desired object will fulfil them. A friend who wants an expensive watch can make the watch desirable. A circle of people going through breakups can make single life feel newly attractive. Mimetic desire can help people form social bonds, yet Kierkegaard worries about the point at which imitation removes the shape of an individual life.

Kierkegaard’s individualism is existential and religious rather than a simple political defence of private choice. He thinks a person’s relation to God can bring out what is unique in them. Inwardness and self-standing let a person receive their own perspective as a source of value. The public works against that relation by making people judge themselves from an abstract and supposedly objective point of view.

Objectivity, in this part of the video, means detachment from one’s own subjectivity. Reflection teaches a person to distrust the perspective that could tell them what matters, so social pressure begins to favour assimilation. Kierkegaard describes the individual as belonging to an abstraction in the way a serf belongs to an estate. The person becomes part of a general category whose reflection has already absorbed them.

The video calls this process levelling. It seeks equality by making people alike, sanding away the awkward edges that make one person’s life distinct from another’s. Kierkegaard does not attribute the process to a secret group directing society. He thinks levelling grows from a passionless envy that comes from the inability to commit. People who have given themselves to nothing can resent the person who has found an idea or vocation worth defending.

The presenter connects this account to Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, which treats moral condemnation as a possible response to unequal power. Nietzsche associates the pattern with Christian ethics and Saint Paul. Kierkegaard’s claim is narrower. He sees levelling as a distinct feature of modernity, intensified by its suspicion of passionate action and its preference for endless reflection and discussion.

The cost becomes clearer through The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard analyses despair as a damaged relation to oneself. A person who does not know themselves can spend a life chasing mirages without finding what they are willing to have faith in. If the public absorbs the individual, the person loses the standpoint from which they can affirm that one thing matters more than another. They try to see through everyone’s eyes and discover that every value looks interchangeable.

This also destroys the possibility of commitment. A person who wants to become a perfect member of an abstract public cannot risk a leap of faith away from comfortable reflection. They remain in endless conversation about the price of milk or the latest opera, and the life that results becomes anonymous. The video presents this as the existential horror of levelling: a person can survive without ever having taken a position that was theirs.

A nineteenth-century diagnosis in the internet age

The video leaves the present-day comparison open. It asks whether the public pressing on individuality is new, whether recent conditions have made it worse, or whether conformity is a lasting condition of social life. The same essay that criticises extreme conformity also describes people’s newfound ability to form opinions about almost everything. That capacity might give individuals more ways to differ, even when the opinions remain weakly held.

The presenter therefore treats Kierkegaard’s account as a starting point. The essay comes from the middle of the nineteenth century, whilst the present audience lives with a scale of information and publicity that Kierkegaard could not have seen. The source finds a real resemblance in passive spectatorship, information overload, and the loss of clear direction. It also leaves room for the possibility that the resemblance has been overstated.

Limits and references

This note reconstructs the presenter’s interpretation of Kierkegaard from the complete English automatic caption track, metadata, description, and chapters. The captions repeatedly render Kierkegaard’s name as forms such as “Kagard” and “Kicker Godard”. I have normalised clear recognition errors, along with Hubert L. Dreyfus, René Girard, and Nietzsche, whilst keeping the source’s uncertain dates and attributions visible.

The video supplies no linked further-reading list. Its description contains a Patreon link and an email-list signup, which are omitted because they do not carry the argument. The references below are the named works and ideas that the speaker invokes. The presenter gives no full bibliographic details for Dreyfus’s paper, and the paper’s date remains a claim made in the video rather than an independently established fact here. The contemporary claims about harassment and suicide likewise belong to the source’s argument and have no named evidence in the video.