The first ten pages of Kierkegaard’s The Present Age contain his preliminary remarks.
He begins: “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion,
momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose.”
In other words, reflection and thought have replaced passion and emotion in the present generation.
The result is enthusiastic planning, followed by torpor.
This is Kirkegaard’s diagnosis of post-revolution modernity.
Like precocious children, we mature too soon, and tend to overthink everything; we have
too much self-awareness to act decisively, as our parents and grandparents did.
Even suicide becomes for us, not the work of a passionate moment (think of a spruned
lover throwing himself off a cliff), but the work of endless deliberation and weighing
up of factors (think of Hamlet soliloquizing endlessly).
We aim at decision without action, since action requires passion and commitment.
Perhaps we should say we live in the Age of Intellectuals.
Our time seems to promise greatness, but lapses into inactivity; we can’t get anything done.
This age tempts us to the inertia of endless reflection, a temptation of the mind.
This temptation is tied up with the prominence of advertising and publicity, of making oneself known.
Public awareness, show, and vanity replace authenticity and commitment.
Kierkegaard contrasts the strength required to rebel with the calculating intelligence
of the present age. Instead of rebelling, we analyze.
Our revolutionaries might call a meeting to discuss rebellion, and having talked the problem
out, all would go home satisfied with their work.
We might say committees and deliberation are our substitutes for action.
This chart sums up some substitutions of the present age.
Instead of profound learning, we have fundraising (selling subscriptions) for a proposed system,
which never advances past the outline stage.
Instead of long painstakingly worked out philosophical systems, we have lightweight encylopaedists,
a kind of nineteenth century Wikipedia.
Rather than renounce the world for religion’s sake, we prefer to found a society to seek
the salvation of souls.
Instead of great and good actions, we indulge our anticipation, and prefer to be recognized
in advance, for what we plan to do.
(One might think here of Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded right after
he took office.)
Instead of performing definite actions, we seek out flattery and the illusion of achievement.
And rather than act ourselves, we prefer to leave the world’s problems to the next generation.
What all these have in common is the replacement of the genuine with shallow and vain substitutes.
One of the most important parts of this section is the Ice Skater Analogy.
I think it contains some of the major themes of the book in a single image, so please read
pages 8-9 several times carefully.
In a passionate age, a skater would risk death to skate out over thin ice to retrieve a jewel.
We in the audience would admire his bravery in risking his life.
We would mourn him if he dies in the attempt, and celebrate his victory if he succeeds.
He runs a risk, and we admire that.
In a reflective age, a skater skates up to the very limit of safety, but without foolishly
risking his life.
Everyone recognizes it would be foolish and irrational to risk one’s life in this circumstance.
We in the audience praise this skater’s cleverness and prudence in going up the very
limit of safety, without going over.
Thus, says Kierkegaard, the daring and enthusiasm of the first skater are transformed in to
a feat of skill by the second skater.
In the present reflective age, intelligence has got the upper hand, it transforms the
real task into an unreal trick.
Furthermore, because we in the audience recognize that the second skater has not done anything
we ourselves could not do, with proper preparation, our praise of him turns out to be thinly disguised
praise of ourselves.
There is nothing heroic about the second skater, and the world in which he seeks and wins the
crowd’s admiration is a world that has lost its sense of the heroic.
No one ever runs any risk, and in fact everyone agrees that running risks like the first skater
is a bit crazy.
In the modern age there is a shift from proving oneself by action, like the first skater,
to engaging in reflection, thought, or speech about the problem itself.
Kierkegaard notes that this modern world lacks a sense of humor, because it does not have
the needed interiority and ethical view of life.
To us, everything is a joke, but nothing is funny.
For us, he concludes, the sole object of desire is money, as an abstraction.
This brings us to the end of the first part of The Present Age.
In the next part, Kierkegaard will discuss envy and levelling as characteristic of the present age.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.