Modelo Examen 10 – Reading – Part 3

“Publicity in general is a very destructive thing, for any artist,” Susan Sontag admonished in 1969. More than a century earlier, another sage of the ages and one of Sontag’s greatest influences made the same point in far less ambiguous terms in The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard (public library) — the same fantastic volume that gave us the Danish philosopher’s prescient insights on why haters hate and why we conform to peer pressure. But the greatest threat to the written word, Kierkegaard believed, were writers themselves. One can only imagine what he would have made of today’s listicles and content-farmed mediocrity as he bemoans the business of letters.

Really, an author’s lot has gradually deteriorated to be the most wretched state of all. An author ordinarily must present himself hat in hand, bowing and cringing, recommending himself with fine letters of introduction. How stupid: one who writes must understand that about which he writes better than he who reads; otherwise he would not write. Or one must manage to become a shrewd little pocket-lawyer proficient at gulling the public. — That I will not do, no I won’t; no I won’t — no, the Devil take the whole caboodle. I write the way I want to, and that’s the way it’s going to be; the rest can do what they like, they can stop buying, stop reading, stop reviewing, etc.

Evans characterizes Kierkegaard’s portrait of human life as “open-ended” and “unfinished”, containing a tension between the limiting conditions of our facticity and our boundless sense of possibility. On the one hand, we are contingent beings, born into a certain historical situation, made of certain genetic material; on the other hand, we each have the capacity to imagine endless ways in which our life could unfold from any point forward. This is the “basic incongruity” that lies “at the heart of human existence”: we must somehow work out a relation to “the infinite and the finite” or “the possible and the necessary”. A brief way to describe the “religious life” is that it is one in which we have come to terms with our finite dependency, and affirmed our highest ideals, in relation to God as the source of our being. 

For Kierkegaard, whose daily routine involved long walks through the streets of Copenhagen, striking up conversations as he went, the results were devastating. Children began to taunt him in the street, and he no longer felt he could interact with people in the same way. In a small city, he’d become a laughing-stock. In one sense, Kierkegaard ultimately won: within the year The Corsair had folded and both its editor, Meyer Goldschmitt, and secret backer, P.L. Møller, had left Denmark, the latter never to return. Both are now otherwise forgotten, while Kierkegaard is read in dozens of languages every day. But the affair clearly left a bruise on what was left of Kierkegaard’s life. Thus far, this looks like one familiar sort of story: the story of what we now call “legacy media” going after a public figure in a campaign to destroy them. Yet Kierkegaard’s critique goes deeper than mere pique, and sounds a warning about forms of media he himself could not have imagined.