Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/when-kierkegaard-got-cancelled

by bookofjoe • 2 months ago

100 59 2 months ago

Article 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.

tptacek3• 2 months ago

I 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_vienna8• 2 months ago

By 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

righthand• 2 months ago

It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.

The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.

jjtheblunt• 2 months ago

to your point, a book i had as a kid in chicago suburbia has a section on hyphens and dashes

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to...

settsu• 2 months ago

If only there was a way to find out the truth. But who has the appetite for that these days? Or the appetite for the effort required?

The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:

...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.

foxglacier4• 2 months ago

You people should work out why you need to know if something was AI written or not. If there's really no way to know the truth, then the truth can't have any impact on you, so it doesn't matter. Why then do you care?

I've heard people say they want a human connection with the author but there was never one anyway. It's 1-way (parasocial), repeatedly edited (not natural human thought), formulaic (effectively AI writing rules implemented by a human), sometimes written by multiple separate people, and you have no other interactions with the same individual(s) so you can't build any kind of relationship or coherent understanding of them.

Consider me. You've probably never interacted with me before and probably never will again. I might be two separate people. I might be an AI. This might be a copy-paste of something I already wrote to 10 other people. Will knowing any of that stuff make a difference to you?

pasquinelli2• 2 months ago

i would expect emdashes in a professionally published website.

jknoepfler• 2 months ago

particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.

jermaustin1• 2 months ago

Same. I believe Word and most other word processors and desktop publishing applications convert standard keyboard-typed hyphens to em- or en-dashes automatically, and have for decades.

ofcourseyoudo• 2 months ago

84% likely human on zerogpt, but you could have done that yourself.

goolz2• 2 months ago

ZeroGPT is a gimmick. Just last month it flagged my paper as AI and I wrote the thing myself. How is it coming up with that 84%? Seems like snakeoil to me. Even the academic department at my Uni agreed and admitted they cannot use any of these AI checkers in actual academic hearings. They are akin to dowsing rods.

nonameiguess• 2 months ago

Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.

Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.

vardalab2• 2 months ago

Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition we are discussing em-dashes. Peak HN.

operatingthetan• 2 months ago

Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition

Why didn't you discuss these?

vardalab2• 2 months ago

But I did.

newer_vienna8• 2 months ago

Always 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!

PunchyHamster• 2 months ago

If I want to ask AI about something I'd ask AI about something, not read someone else doing it

nine_k• 2 months ago

The 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.”

narrator• 2 months ago

As more and more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder. When our cargo cult like understanding of it all fails to give us what we want, we find attachment figures, like substitute parents to guide us and shape our understanding, and even our desires. Those attachment figures might be faking it too and often are, but it's better than despair at the incomprehensibility of reality.

pixl972• 2 months ago

more of the world becomes less comprehensible, we revert to a childlike understanding of the world, where things are vast and incomprehensible and filled with wonder.

When has the world ever been comprehensible? The vast majority of people thought that lighting was gods fighting and where looking to sacrifice some person if they thought it would buy them favor with said gods.

TooSmugToFail• 2 months ago

Oh boy, would he enjoy the modernity.

jrowen• 2 months ago

I disagree, I found the story to be the interesting part. It's inspiring to me when people have the moral conviction to put themselves out there in a big way at great risk to their personal lives and mental health. And it was gratifying that he succeeded in swaying someone from the dark to the light.

History is rife with examples of "what's old is new again." Human nature and our psychological and social issues are basically constant throughout history. Good examples like this are always worth noting but, as you note, it's nothing very new, I'm sure one of the Greeks said something similar.

snthpy• 2 months ago

I agree. A good read overall as well.

throwaway27448• 2 months ago

And folks claim cancel culture is new smh

pixl972• 2 months ago

Just wait till they learn about the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.

daseiner13• 2 months ago

or 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.

dwd4• 2 months ago

Highly 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"

daseiner13• 2 months ago

identical 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)

dwd4• 2 months ago

H.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."

"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."

croes• 2 months ago

I guess he wouldn’t have thought much of social media either

dwd4• 2 months ago

Yes, he had quite a few things to say. Unfortunately I don't have my ratty bookmarked copy on hand as he wrote some quite prescient ideas that are relatable to our "modern" world.

"We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. In all our 'freedom,' we seek one thing: to be able to live without responsibility." probably sums up the Instagram/TikTok generation.

newer_vienna8• 2 months ago

He saw that pure focus on Fact is empty without a framework of meaning behind it. He does not mean falsehood when he says degeneration! But purpose must transcend and direct the truth from fact.

gocsjess• 2 months ago

Nothing ever happens

so Kierkegaard originated this meme

philipallstar• 2 months 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.

Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks

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