Kierkegaard and Issues in Contemporary Ethics by Melissa Fox-Muraton

Author:Melissa Fox-Muraton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2020-10-26T13:38:59.515000+00:00

7.6

A Positive Vision?

Our discussion to this point has made it seem as if Kierkegaard’s moral evaluation of the internet would be entirely negative. On the story told so far, social media partakes of some of the most ethically dangerous features of the press: it encourages people to irresponsibly take refuge in the “public,” passively absorbing and remediating information instead of forming commitments and taking action, and perverts communication by its sheer scale in a way that makes people ridiculous and exposes them to real harm. Just as the press united its readership “in a mere abstract fusion…where individual reflection and personal initiative are obstructed if not annihilated,”60 so too it appears the internet, and particularly social media.

Yet as Karl Verstrynge has suggested, beyond these negative assessments Kierkegaard may also offer at least an intimation of how an existentially authentic life may be available online. Verstrynge and Thorbjornsson note that Dreyfus’ critique of Kierkegaard leaves no room for the possibility that “online the individual actually might be able to enrich his existence and benefit from his connectivity rather than losing himself in the midst of it all.”61 While Kierkegaard is critical of the media for its construction of de-individuating publics, he also sometimes, albeit obliquely, offers a vision of what a positive relationship between individuals in society might look like—and here we can perhaps see where a more positive vision of a world characterized by the “disproportionate communication” of the internet might be attained.

Kierkegaard’s critique of the media is clearly of a piece with his broader critique of any form of social organization which involves de-individualizing collectivism—and hence with his critique of the democratic reforms of 1848. There is a widespread assumption in the literature that, as David Lappano puts it, Kierkegaard snobbishly “dismisses the liberalizing momentum in nineteenth-century Europe, and that he leaves no room for the possibility that corporate life or collective action can produce positive societal results.”62 Kierkegaard takes it that action is fundamentally an individual undertaking; to be absorbed into the public is to be nothing but a spectator to action. As someone concerned to offer a corrective against his era, Kierkegaard is primarily interested in stressing this negative point. Yet as is often the case with Kierkegaard, his negative case allows us to glimpse a positive description in relief. Consider this from Two Ages: “Not until the single individual has established an ethical stance despite the whole world, not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting; otherwise it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak, a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child-marriage.”63

While the point here is primarily to emphasize the necessity of individuation against the crowd, Kierkegaard here gestures towards the possibility of community action. This is only possible where people relate as themselves to a coordinating idea rather than simply subsuming themselves in the abstract category of the public or the crowd:

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