Saba: Contextual Reading
Prompt:
Talk about the following excerpt at length. First as a text embedded within larger conversations (books, broader discussions, living and perhaps contested traditions, etc) and then treat its selection and public posting as a communicative act that may be completely divorced from that contextual reading. What might someone posting this text on social media be trying to say?
"He has found himself confronted daily with the question of how to be seen: Who should he be in this new-fashioned, glass-fronted world? Which mask should he wear, what image should he display? And what images will other people make of him?"
- Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019)
The central tension in Clare Carlisle’s passage is between the person one is, the person one chooses to present to the world, and the person other people believe they see. These three identities may overlap, but they are never entirely identical.
What makes the passage especially interesting is that Carlisle is writing about Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a philosopher who made the difficulty of becoming oneself one of the central preoccupations of his work. He was also unusually sensitive to his public image, fascinated by disguise and theatricality, and eventually subjected to a campaign of public ridicule.
The passage therefore describes more than an ordinary anxiety about appearances. It raises a philosophical problem: How can someone establish an authentic identity when their existence is continually mediated by the perceptions, expectations and judgments of other people?
“Which mask should he wear” is not a loose metaphor. Kierkegaard published much of his major work under invented authors: Victor Eremita, Johannes de silentio, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, and later Anti-Climacus. These were not thin disguises (everyone in Copenhagen knew who wrote them). They were a method he called indirect communication. Each pseudonym embodies a way of life, aesthetic, ethical or religious, and the reader is left to make their own choice among them, without an authority telling them what to conclude.
He also managed his public image deliberately. The best-known story: while writing Either/Or, he reportedly appeared at the theatre each evening for a few minutes so that Copenhagen would think him an idle dandy, then hurried home to write. After breaking off his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, he tried to look like a cad, apparently so that she could blame him and recover more easily. So he did not stand above image-making. He practised it skilfully and with a troubled conscience, which is part of why the question in Carlisle’s sentence hurt him.
