630
DWIGHT MACDONALD
s~upbomness
of some isolated creator. But if we are to have
mor~
tpan this, it will be because our new public for High Culture
becomes conscious of itself and begins to show some
espirit de
c{)rps,
insisting on higher standards and setting itself off-joyous–
ly, implacably-from most of its fellow citizens, not only from
the . Masscult depths but
also
from the agreeable ooze of the
Midcult swamp.
In "The Present Age," Kierkegaard writes as follows:
In order that everything should be reduced to the same level
it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, a monstrous abstrac–
tion, .an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage--and
that phantom is the public....
The public is a concept which could not have
occurr~d
in
antiquity because the people
en masse in corpore
took part
in
any
situation which arose . . . and moreover the individual was person–
a:Iiy present and had to submit at once to applause or disapproval
for his decision. Only when the sense of association in society is no
longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press
able to create that abstraction, "the public", consisting of unreal in–
dividuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situa–
tion or organization-and yet are held together as a whole.
The public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together,
but it is a body which can never be reviewed; it cannot even
be
represented because it is an abstraction. Nevertheless, when the age
is reflective [i.e., the individual sees himself only as he is reflected in
a ·collective body] and passionless and destroys everything concrete,
the public becomes everything and is supposed to include everything.
And ... the individual is thrown back upon himself....
A public is neither a nation nor a generation nor a community
nor a society nor these particular men, for all these are only what
they are through the concrete. No single person who belongs to the
public makes a real commitment; for some hours of the day, per–
haps, he ·belongs to a real public-at moments when he is nothing
else, since when he really is what he is, he does not form part of the
public. Made up of such individuals, of individuals at the moment
when they are nothing, a public is a kind of gigantic something, an
