Chatter (Gerede)

In the theoretical move traced in McCormick's account, "Chatter (Gerede)" names a structural mode of discourse in which excessive, proliferating talk functions as a flight from existential inwardness — what Kierkegaard diagnoses through the figure of the talkative barber Gert Westphaler as alazoneia, a false pretension sustained by garrulousness. The crucial point is not merely that chatter is noisy or vain, but that it is constitutively evasive: the speaker who chatters does not simply fail to say something meaningful, but actively displaces the encounter with existential particularity through the restless movement of abstract, omnivorous speech. The structural analogy drawn is sharp — the systematic speculative idealist thinker and the charlatan barber share a common deficiency: both substitute the horizontal movement of discourse (topic hopping, abstract omniscience, intellectual restlessness) for the vertical descent into genuine inwardness. Chatter is thus not a surface failure of style but an ontological posture, a way of being-in-discourse that forecloses self-relation.

This reading explicitly anticipates the Heideggerian concept of Gerede (idle talk), to which McCormick's text points as the concept's next theoretical home. Where Kierkegaard frames chatter through an ethical-existential lens — as pride, self-ignorance, and evasion of the particular — Heidegger will give it a structural-ontological status as one of the three modes of Dasein's fallenness. Together, the Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian trajectories locate Chatter at the intersection of the Abstract (discourse that has lost its grounding in the particular) and a deficient mode of Subjectivity (one that cannot turn back on itself in genuine Reflection). Chatter, in this sense, is the discursive form that alazoneia takes when it operates at the level of thought itself.

Within the source samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, Chatter (Gerede) appears at the hinge between a Kierkegaardian critique of speculative idealism and the anticipation of Heidegger's existential analytic, placing it at a pivotal moment in a genealogy of everyday talk as a philosophical problem. The concept is not yet fully Heideggerian here — it is filtered through Kierkegaard's comic-ironic staging of the braggart figure — but it already carries the structural weight it will bear in Being and Time: chatter as a mode of being that substitutes the breadth of public discourse for depth of self-relation.

Relative to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Chatter can be read as the discursive actualization of the Abstract: like abstract universality, it ranges freely across topics without ever settling into the particularity that would make genuine self-knowledge possible. It is the failure mode of Reflection — not the absence of discourse turned back on itself, but its parody, a speech that circles and proliferates without ever achieving the self-constitutive movement that genuine reflection demands. And against the canvas of Subjectivity as defined in this corpus — divided, non-self-identical, formed through a descent into inwardness rather than a flight from it — Chatter names the evasion of exactly that subjective division: the chattering subject papers over the gap in Being with words, refusing the split that would constitute genuine subjectivity. Speculative Identity provides an ironic frame: the speculative thinker's abstract omniscience and the charlatan's garrulous self-ignorance are, on this account, the same structure seen from two sides.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.40)

the resonance he notes between excessive pride and excessive talk, as we shall see, receives ample scholarly attention in Martin Heidegger's early discussions of Gerede

The quote's theoretical load lies in its coupling of "excessive pride" (alazoneia) with "excessive talk," condensing the ethical and discursive registers into a single structural resonance — and then immediately projecting that structure forward into Heidegger's Gerede, signaling that what Kierkegaard diagnosed as a moral failing will be re-inscribed by Heidegger as an ontological one. The phrase "ample scholarly attention" further marks the term as a genuine theoretical crossroads rather than a passing observation.