An arresting sentence

I just ran across this sentence in Kierkegaard's Fear and Tremblng (Princeton Universty Press, 1952, p. 6): "The present author . . . writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes the more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes." This attitude, of course, is diametrically opposed to the culture of social media where popularity is everything, where one seeks to have the most "likes" and having what one has said "go viral" is the height of success. Why did K. say this? The context makes clear that he feels he is living in an age in which he is utterly "out of fashion," in an age "when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can be easily perused during the afternoon nap." In such an age, a book titled Fear and Trembling is unlikely to be popular! No less so today. I suppose there is a possible logical fallacy here. The Syllogism "A. Those who speak the truth have few listeners. B. I have few listeners. THEREFORE: I speak the truth," is fallacious: the fallacy of the "undistributed middle." If it read "All those who have few listensrs speak the truth; I have few listeners, I speak the truth" it would be logically valid, but the first premise would be highly questionable. Some of those who have few listensrs - perhaps the majority - are just boring, not "speakers of the truth." I can't imagine that K. was unaware of this fallacy. So I think he is expressing a feeling, not making a logical argument. But what he said gave me pause. It makes me all the more curious just what the class at Swarthmore (where we will be studying Fear and Trembling in a couple of weeks) will think of this work. Ellen was also speculating that K's thought seems very "male" to her. The idea of "standing alone before God" is not an idea most women resonate with. This brought to mind the work of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice) and her critique of Lawrence Kohlberg's work (The Philosophy of Moral Development) on the moral development of adolescents which he claimed was universal in application but which she felt might work for boys but doesn't work for girls. The Swarthmore class is made up mostly of women. They are certainly the most vocal. We'll see!

Søren Kierkegaard