The Raven's Roost

The process which Kierkegaard calls “leveling” is that by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind. Because he identifies this abstraction with objective reality, or simply with “the truth,” he abdicates his own experience and intuition. He renounces conscience and is lost. But the public mind is a pure abstraction, a nonentity. “For,” says Kierkegaard, “the public is made up of individuals at the moments when they are nothing,” that is to say, when they have abdicated conscience, personal decision, choice, and responsibility, and yielded themselves to the joy of being part of a pure myth. The mythical being which thinks and acts for everybody, and does the most shameful of deeds without a moment of hesitation or of shame, is actually no being at all. Those who take part in its acts can do so insofar as they have abstracted themselves from themselves and have surrendered to the public void, which they believe to be fully and objectively real: this collective self whose will is the will of nobody, whose mind is the mind of nobody, which can contradict itself and remain consistent with itself. “More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all – in order to become the public.” Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, the public is an “abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way by all the participants becoming a third party (an onlooker).” This process of leveling, of self-abandonment, of abdication of identity, in order to dare what nobody dares and to participate in the unthinkable as though one were an innocent bystander, sweeps through the world as a “hopeless forest fire of abstraction.” The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or his science; he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection (estrangement) just as a serf belongs to an estate. The abstract leveling process, that self-combustion of the human race produced by the friction which arises when the individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue like a trade wind until it consumes everything.”
 

 

The existentialist is aware of this danger above all. He tirelessly insists that it is the great danger of our time, since it is completely prevalent both in the capitalist positivism of America and in the Marxist positivism of the Communist countries. For this reason, the existentialist is condemned everywhere for a wide variety of reasons which usually boil down to this one: he is a rebel, an individualist, who, because he withdraws from the common endeavor of technological society to brook on his own dissatisfactions, condemns himself to futility, sterility, and despair. Since he refuses to participate in the glorious and affluent togetherness of mass society, he must pay the price of fruitless isolation. He is a masochist. He gets no better than he deserves.