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Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks
- timonoko 6mo ago[flagged]
- gerikson 6mo agoThis is Søren, not Emil.
- tokai 6mo agoI know nobody reads the things posted here before commenting, but this is pretty egregious.
- downwithbgp 6mo agoWhy spend money on tokens to process linked text when you can comment off the headline?
- PaulHoule 6mo agoI have Søren on my mind and would mistake Emil for him and not the other way around.
- tokai 6mo agoEmil is a fringe crackpot racist and Søren is like top 10 most influential philosophers. Anyone thinking Emil first should maybe take a break from the internet.
- cubefox 6mo agoEmil is a highly cited scientist doing lots of empirical research despite relentless cancellation attempts by people who don't like the results: that intelligence is heritable to a substantial degree and that it differs statistically between groups of people. If you think any of his results are false, say so. Just accusing someone of racism is the exact type of mobster cancel culture that was already wrong in the case of Søren Kierkegaard.
- fsckboy 6mo agoSørenity now.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- plazmatic 6mo ago[dead]
- newer_vienna 6mo agoArticle is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
- tptacek 6mo agoI doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that". I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
- newer_vienna 6mo agoBy itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo agoSo we're actually witnessing in real time that he was slowly learning where to use emdashes? That's sort of hilarious.
- panflute 6mo agoHow would the rise of dash usage in LLMs have arised if a significant portion of non-LLM writers weren't inclined to take them up and make them more common? The only explanation I see is that they are common in training materials we don't as commonly consume as website visitors.
- phainopepla2 6mo agoI have often wondered this myself, especially because the same stylistic quirks are found across models from different labs. I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, but whatever the explanation is, it is undoubtedly true that LLMs use them to an almost absurd extent compared to the vast majority of human writers. Anyone who reads a lot of prose can see that.
- vardalab 6mo agoInstead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition we are discussing em-dashes. Peak HN.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago>Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition Why didn't you discuss these?
- vardalab 6mo agoBut I did.
- newer_vienna 6mo agoAlways happy to discuss existentialism, but I'm not going to read through an AI generated article. The other comment I wrote today was me recommending Borges to people!
- fdmxdmxd 6mo ago[flagged]
- newer_vienna 6mo agoExtremely rude reply. I don't want HN to be an AI article aggregator. And you sure don't seem to want to discuss anything important anyways.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoIf I want to ask AI about something I'd ask AI about something, not read someone else doing it
- nine_k 6mo agoThe interesting part is not the intro about a literary conflict inside mid-19th-century Danish literary circles, but the quotes from Kirkegaard that seem to apply to our modern situation, and to social media, which did not and could not exist in 1840s, but the dynamics of which was already visible in the literary society. The crowd of opinion without much substance, with the desire to stand out, but also a desire to deride anything that does not align with their notion of proper. Nothing very new, but amplified by the power of the printed word. > Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop. > What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.”4 Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.” > Out of this fragmentation arises something new – the public, a hollow substitute for genuine judgment. Where inward conviction falters, collective opinion steps in to bind the pieces together. But the bond it forges is thin and corrosive. Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests, functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.” > For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement. Committees, petitions, surveys – these are less tools of participation than props in a play where everyone can feel involved. “Now everyone can have an opinion,” Kierkegaard quips, “but they have to band together numerically in order to have one. Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion.” > What holds this abstraction together is envy, the “negative unifying principle” of modern life.8 Envy does not look upward; it glances sideways, measuring its own worth by comparison, punishing excellence for the discomfort it causes. Yet even as it resents distinction, it cannot help but crave it. The result is a paradox of modern identity: in seeking to assert ourselves, we demand validation from a phantom audience. “That is the leveling process at its lowest” Kierkegaard warns, “for it always equates itself to the divisor by means of which everyone is reduced to a common denominator.”
- throwaway27448 6mo agoAnd folks claim cancel culture is new smh
- pixl97 6mo agoJust wait till they learn about the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
- daseiner1 6mo agoor the imprisonment of Galileo or the persecution of Socrates or the crucifixion of Christ or the legal charges against James Comey or even interpersonal dynamics in the corporate world. politically powerful insecure people swinging a stick at those who challenge them.
- dwd 6mo agoHighly recommend reading Kierkegaard's Journals where he writes about what he called the evils of the "daily press" and also his relationship to Regina and his attempts the befriend the Bishop Mynster. "The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control"
- daseiner1 6mo agoidentical critique of democracy, just sub in “manipulation of voters“ for choice of readers” (my comment is admittedly in poor form since I’m just redirecting to a hobby horse of mine)
- dwd 6mo agoH.L. Mencken is my preferred critic of democracy. "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." or "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
- wahern 6mo agoMencken's cynicism and mockery were arguably the type of thing Kierkegaard lamented, and perhaps in a sense were more a cause of social breakdown more than a consequence.
- dwd 6mo agoFrom reading his journals the editor of the Corsair publicly mocked him and used the paper to hide behind (in the name of journalism). His lamentations on journalism are very much due to this personal attack and he does name the perpetrator in his writings. Kierkegaard himself had his targets for cynicism, primarily the state church (Danish Lutheran) that he attacked endlessly in his writings.
- gocsjess 6mo ago> Nothing ever happens so Kierkegaard originated this meme
- philipallstar 6mo ago> True to its name, The Corsair cultivated a reputation for mischief Mischief is a crazy way to describe the name of a chief implement in the Barbary slave trade.