Delusion
ELI5
Delusion here means that people who gossip or produce shallow talk can genuinely convince themselves that what they're doing is important and meaningful — not because they're lying, but because the very nature of chatter makes it look serious from the inside.
Definition
In the context of McCormick's conceptual history of everyday talk, "Delusion" names the condition of a subject who mistakes the superficial, self-referential circulation of discourse for genuine intellectual or cultural substance. In Kierkegaard's 1836 polemic — reconstructed as the inaugural moment of his sustained theorization of "chatter" (snak) — the delusion in question is specifically the journalists' conviction that their "journalistic literature" carries philosophical seriousness and social significance. This is not mere false belief in the ordinary sense; it is structurally produced by the very form of chatter itself: because idle, circulating speech generates an appearance of intelligibility and even profundity, those embedded in its circulation cannot see through it to its emptiness. The subject of delusion is not lying, nor is he cognitively impaired — he is captured by the sham clarity that the medium of chatter produces as its normal product.
The delusion is therefore coextensive with what the concept tracks as "self-delusion": not an external misrepresentation imposed on the subject from outside, but a reflexive capture in which the subject's own discursive activity is the mechanism of his misrecognition. The journalist who believes his daily output is "serious and significant" is deluded precisely insofar as he participates in — and is constituted by — the very form of discourse (gossip, nonsense, confusion) that forecloses the possibility of genuine reflection. This aligns with the broader Kierkegaardian theorization, anchored to the literary figure of the barber Gert Westphaler, in which "chatter" is not a contingent social habit but a mode of existence that structurally occludes authentic thought.
Place in the corpus
This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 30), within the argument that Kierkegaard's theorization of chatter begins in 1836 as a polemical diagnosis of journalistic discourse. Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Delusion sits closest to Gerede (Heidegger's idle talk): both concepts identify a structural feature of inauthentic discourse — the way speech that circulates without genuine referential grounding produces a "sham clarity" that passes for understanding. The Kierkegaardian delusion is in effect the subjective correlate of Gerede's epistemic effect: Gerede covers over the matter at hand through smooth circulation, and Delusion names the condition of the subject who has been captured by that covering-over and now mistakes it for illumination. The concept also resonates with Abstract in the Hegelian register: the deluded journalist treats the one-sided, de-contextualized form of journalistic chatter as if it were concrete, substantive thought — the classic error of the Understanding that cannot see its own one-sidedness. More distantly, the concept echoes the structure of Automaton: just as the automaton is the mechanical, self-circulating signifying chain that mistakes its own repetition for meaningful return, the deluded chatterer is caught in a loop of self-referential discourse that generates the appearance of significance without ever encountering the Real of genuine thought. Repetition and Irony are the two cross-referenced terms most relevant to Kierkegaard's own authorial method: where Delusion marks the pathological endpoint of unreflective chatter, Irony (as Kierkegaard theorizes it) is the corrective — the mode of indirect communication that punctures self-satisfied repetition by exposing its emptiness.
Key formulations
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk (p.30)
the delusion that their 'journalistic literature' is somehow more serious and significant
The phrase is theoretically loaded because the scare quotes around "journalistic literature" perform the very ironic puncturing that Kierkegaard opposes to delusion — they mark a pretension to literary seriousness that the form of chatter structurally cannot sustain — while the word "delusion" (rather than "error" or "misunderstanding") insists that the misrecognition is not merely cognitive but constitutive of the subject's self-relation within that discourse.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (2)
-
#01
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_160"></span>**psychosis**
Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Lacanian theory of psychosis as a clinical structure defined by foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, producing a hole in the symbolic order and imprisoning the subject in the imaginary; it further articulates the later reformulation via the Borromean Knot and the role of the sinthome as a fourth ring.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis it is important to distinguish between psychosis, which is a clinical structure, and psychotic phenomena such as DELUSIONS and HALLUCINATIONS.
-
#02
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.30
Barbers and Philosophers
Theoretical move: The passage traces Kierkegaard's debut as an author to an 1836 newspaper polemic, arguing that this exchange inaugurates his sustained theorization of "chatter" (snak) as a philosophical concept—identifying it with nonsense, gossip, confusion, and self-delusion—and establishes Holberg's fictional barber Gert Westphaler as the literary anchor for that theorization.
the delusion that their 'journalistic literature' is somehow more serious and significant