Leveling

Leveling, as theorized in McCormick's reading of Kierkegaard, names the socio-logical process by which modern democratic-commercial life reduces qualitative, individual inwardness to a quantitative, arithmetic social mass. It is the operative mechanism of the "present age": rather than sublating genuine oppositions (good/evil, the exceptional and the common) into a higher synthesis, leveling dissolves qualitative distinctions into an undifferentiated statistical equivalence. Individuals are transformed into fractions of an abstract public—a "gallery-public"—denominated by a shared divisor, such that all are rendered formally equal not through any positive achievement but through mutual reciprocal negation. The concept is defined by its negative character: leveling is a "negative unity of the negative mutual reciprocity of individuals," a process that levels downward by eliminating the very differences that would make decisive action, inwardness, or genuine selfhood possible.

Crucially, leveling operates through and as chatter. The communicative medium of this flattening is gossip, small talk, and the "garrulous experience of common sense"—forms of talk that circulate endlessly without producing qualitative decision or transformation. Leveling is also the social counterpart to a logical fraud: the sorites reasoning that pretends quantitative accumulation can produce qualitative change. Against Hegelian Aufhebung, Kierkegaard insists that genuine qualitative change requires a sudden leap, not gradual numerical progression. Leveling is thus the social instantiation of the dialectical fraud—a pseudo-dialectic that masquerades as movement while in fact foreclosing the possibility of any real change, ethical or existential.

This concept appears exclusively in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, where it serves as the Kierkegaardian pivot around which the book's conceptual history of everyday talk is organized. McCormick positions leveling as the social-structural diagnosis that underlies Kierkegaard's critique of chatter, and explicitly argues that this structure anticipates both Heidegger's and Lacan's later restatements of the problem of inauthentic or everyday speech. Within the cross-referenced canonical concepts, leveling functions as a critical specification and inversion of several core Lacanian/Hegelian categories. It is a perverse form of Dialectics: rather than the genuine dialectical movement that holds contradiction open and drives toward transformation, leveling enacts a "dialectical fraud" — a pseudo-sublation (Sublation) that dissolves Contradiction rather than sustaining it. Where genuine dialectics, as the corpus defines it, keeps antagonism alive and productive, leveling produces a false Universality — a purely quantitative "equality" achieved by suppressing qualitative difference rather than by constitutively including an excluded remainder.

Leveling also stands in a negative relation to Mediation. Mediation in the Lacanian register requires a genuine symbolic third term that transforms the parties it connects; leveling's arithmetic denominator is a degraded pseudo-mediator that reduces rather than articulates. The concept further connects to Negation and Reflection: Kierkegaard's critique is that modern prudence-reflection (Forstands-Refleksionens) generates endless Negation of particularity without any affirmative moment, while Mediation collapses into self-referential, circular chatter. Finally, Anxiety and the religious leap that Kierkegaard opposes to leveling gesture toward a register beyond the arithmetic — the qualitative inwardness that leveling forecloses but which remains, for Kierkegaard, the only genuine exit from the quantitative mass.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.75)

the dialectic of the present age is oriented to equality, and its most logical implementation, albeit abortive, is leveling, the negative unity of the negative mutual reciprocity of individuals.

The phrase "negative unity of the negative mutual reciprocity" is theoretically dense: it identifies leveling not as a positive bond but as a double negation — individuals negate each other's particularity, and from this mutual cancellation arises a spurious "unity," revealing that the equality produced by modern democratic life is structurally hollow, grounded in subtraction rather than any shared positive content. The qualifier "abortive" further marks this as a failed or fraudulent dialectic, a pseudo-Aufhebung that cannot genuinely sublate its contradictions.