Before the Universal

on Kierkegaard, Hegel, and returning to social media

I was off social media for Lent, and it was not the experience I had expected. It was mostly delightful, so much so that it didn’t feel like a Lenten fast (which also bothered me a bit). While every so often I would think “man, I wish I could tweet that,” and while I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world anymore since I get all my news from social media, mostly I was having a great time being unplugged. And as Easter approached, I felt a lot of ambivalence about returning. I still do.

It is difficult for me to evaluate the overall value of social media use for me. I think I don’t have a lot of the typical social-media-centric vices (obsession/oversharing/parasocial relationships/FOMO), but I have non-typical ones. I am an extremely private person, both online and offline. I’m not a big sharer of feelings or personal information, even among close friends and family. It just doesn’t occur to me. It’s not natural (for me). Because of this, getting off social media didn’t feel like a big loss of personal relationships or anything, but over time it did significantly alter my way of thinking: I largely stopped externalizing my thoughts. When I saw something funny or ridiculous or cute or insightful, instead of posting it or sending it to someone or even telling someone about it, I just experienced it and let it go. Over time, my experiences became more gratifying, fulfilling, and I felt more ownership over them. They felt like mine. Despite this, my day-to-day also became a bit more of a blur, and as I stopped externalizing my thoughts, the thoughts I did have became more nebulous and complicated. I was still THINKING, perhaps more than normal, but the thoughts were less and less thoughts that could be easily distilled and communicated. This, I assume, was a big reason for my anxiety about re-entering virtual society.

If you’ve been to any weddings recently, chances are good that you’ve been victimized by Instagramitis. This has been discussed for years. An acquaintance of mine once recounted a wedding he went to where all the guests were shoved into a small room at the reception venue, and allowed to trickle out to the cocktail hour at an aesthetic pace, so the photographer could get cool photos. This apparently took over an hour. Bachelorette parties and bridal showers, which as of recently were just an evening get-together, have morphed into week-long island getaways where guests must wear coordinated clothing and have particular hair styles. Pinterest et al has come to dominate our way of thinking about special events and ceremonies so completely that some people have rejected whole marriage proposals for not being sufficiently aesthetic. A few days ago, Twitter was abuzz with discussions of various parenting aesthetics, debating which ones were most appealing and why.

Kierkegaard, Hegel, and The Crowd

While the ridiculousness of these trends may just seem kind of funny but ultimately mostly harmless, they point to a phenomenon that I’ve talked about before but haven’t spent much time writing about. I sometimes describe the situation as the loss of first-personal experience, the total collapse of conscious awareness of ourselves into the second-person. In other words, we’ve stopped perceiving ourselves first-personally, and now perceive ourselves as whatever we think others see when they perceive us. Obviously there are degrees of this—if I stub my toe, that pain isn’t going to be filtered through what I imagine others see as I yell out in pain. But if my wedding day is ruined for me before it even occurs, because the weather won’t be ideal for pictures, that sounds like an extreme retreat from, or deprioritization of, one’s first-person experience of the event. The person for whom good pictures of a past event is what determines whether or not she enjoyed the event is someone who is experiencing even her own experiences third-personally. Soren Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, discusses just such a phenomenon:

““[The Crowd is] an abstract something formed so ridiculously that every single participant is a third person. This public then transforms all reality most pleasingly into a theatre, and though it has nothing to do itself it fancies that everything somebody does occurs just so that it can have something to talk about.”

“The Crowd” for Kierkegaard is a recurring entity of critique throughout his work, and refers broadly to any kind of mass movement, political group, social trend, religious movement, etc. To a large extent, these polemics are an attack on the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit, which is something like "objective principles of action grounded in a group or community, which dictates how one ought to live.” But one need not be a Hegelian to accept something like the idea that Kierkegaard is railing against: the idea of a universal, objective, inviolable moral principle(s) which ought to guide our conduct is pervasive throughout Western moral theory. Kierkegaard writes that “[a]s soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal.” To deviate from the universal is to do “wrong.” Hegel’s concept entails a grounding of these principles in state or cultural institutions, which we can see in Kierkegaard’s descriptions of The Crowd as causes, movements, or groups bound by ideological or political similarities/goals.

But while The Crowd is moving and active, it’s not really going anywhere, even if it seems like it is. This is in line with Kierkegaard’s overall critique of Hegel and Hegelianism, which is: Hegel’s teleological picture of Geist and its implications for humanity do not have a definitive end point. The evolutions continue, the thesis/antithesis/synthesis cycle repeating itself ad infinitum, as long as human history goes on. But what is movement without a goal of a resting point?

Kierkegaard repeatedly accuses The Crowd of being “untruth.” This is not to say that crowds are false or say false things or hold false views, but rather to say that The Crowd is not actually the kind of thing that can contain the truth, or speak or even believe the truth. By “truth” here, Kierkegaard means “subjective truth,” a term that has its own rather bespoke description: subjective truth is truth about what is essential to humanity, which is non-propositional and grounded in the single human’s relationship to the Infinite.

“The truth can neither be communicated nor be received without being, as it were, under the eyes of God, without the help of God, without God’s being a participant, the middle term, since God is the truth. Therefore it can be communicated by and received only by the single individual, who as a matter of fact could be every person who is living.” -The Point of View (140)

The consequences of being part of The Crowd, Kierkegaard argues, is that one loses one’s grip on their singularity and the task of becoming “that single individual” who is the kind of thing that can relate to the truth. In The Crowd, views and experiences meld together into a morass of homogeneity that actively morphs ones beliefs and experiences to conform with the group’s (note: extreme examples of this kind of extreme epistemic social reinforcement can be seen in the Mandela Effect). But beyond The Crowd’s propensity to shave the unpalatable edges off of our personal views and beliefs, it also has the effect of easing the burden of responsibility on the individual. The weight of our task becomes distributed among all Crowd members, there is no longer any singular burden to bear. If we do not attain the truth, ah, well, a bitter pill, but one that we all swallow together. If we fail, or if we succeed, we do so together, and I am never alone, and so, for Kierkegaard, I never am at all.

Kierkegaard makes it clear that part of the appeal of The Crowd is communicability. The Crowd is the natural result of being in the Universal, the Ethical—those who are in the Universal have a common language and seek a common good, and acting within the Ethical makes us easy to understand. Acting outside the Ethical (in the realm that Kierkegaard calls Faith) makes our lives, at some level, impossible to communicate to anyone. This is why, in his Fear and Trembling (written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silencio), the Abraham of faith is rendered silent. The desire to be understood, to have our lives make sense to others, is natural. But Kierkegaard argues it is also what prevents us from becoming selves.

Silence

Kierkegaard makes it clear that the silence of Abraham is an unbearably heavy weight, and that the bearing of it is an almost superhuman task that even he (Kierkegaard) himself is not capable of). But this drive to seek communicability and the deep desire for others to find our lives coherent and sensible, at the way that these drives have been grotesquified and ‘roided up by social media et al, strikes me as a way of understanding “Instragramitis” and our ever-increasing inability to experience things first-personally. Being alone with your experiences and thoughts is hard, and the less you do it, the harder it gets, until it starts to feel like agony. We can no longer be alone with ourselves in a room.

This idea has also functioned as part of my theory of declining birth rates. Obviously there are hundreds of contributing factors to that phenomenon, but I cannot think of another life experience (besides, perhaps, one’s relationship to the Infinite!) so incommunicable as being a parent to a child. I think this is obliquely recognized even by people who don’t have children—it is just clearly the kind of thing that you can’t get until you’re in it, and once you’re in it, you are powerless to help others get it. Even among parents, there is unconscious acknowledgement of the knowledge gaps that exist from parent to parent. I can never know what it’s like to be the mother of my nephew, Kendall, even though I know what it’s like to be the mother of my daughters. And there is something threatening about that! Something threatening about deciding one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of your life, the locus of your labor, will be essentially incommunicable to most others. It makes sense then that one would try to shy away from the incommunicability, to talk about parenting “aesthetics” or write parenting rule-books or start parenting social media accounts, etc. And it makes sense that one may want to opt out for this reason.

In any case, a mere 40 days of not posting was interesting in that returning to social media felt weird and fake, and still does. There is no way I could write or post that would give an accurate account of my day-to-day, my thoughts, my experiences of the world, the way the car ride to work felt or the deep ambivalence I feel every time I leave my house and children to go teach my students. To enter into the universal in attempting communication is to negate the truth in some sense. But Kierkegaard did it himself, through intentionally indirect methods, and it is encouraging to me that one may yet find a way of engaging with the world and still work toward becoming that single individual. But right now, post-Lenten absence, I am certainly feeling the dissonance.

**as per usual this is not proofread, merely vomited out of my brain unfiltered, zero AI used and zero grammar checks used, sorry