The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard. Jacob Sawyer
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place in particular disciplines such as science and history. However what he saw as being fundamentally important (an individual’s relation with God and her own self—essential truths concerning existence) could only be taken up and known by each person as a “single individual.” In contrast to this, Kierkegaard saw how the Danish Hegelians were seeking to incorporate Christianity into their systems, moving “beyond” simplistic faith for the sake of progress.147 This was the main target of Kierkegaard’s attack on outwardness: the marriage of Hegelian thought and the church (or the church playing the harlot with Hegel), where philosophy was transgressing its limits.
Kierkegaard was advocating for theology to be recognized as a separate and vital realm of knowing for ethical and religious matters. He sought to remove the confusion that such personal knowing was contingent on scientific, objective knowledge such as that espoused by Hegelian thought.148 Paul Holmer suggests that such rationalistic thinking was common to the point of being “almost indigenous to the intelligentsia” and that Hegel was targeted by Kierkegaard merely as the one who expounded this “intellectualist-myth” in “technical language and with the help of erstwhile dialectical and logical tools.” In contrast to such literary practice, Kierkegaard sought to talk “sensibly and truly about concepts and behavior in . . . various areas,” instead of subsuming all things under the rubric of science or history.149 All of human life cannot be reduced to the descriptive “about,” it must also contain the “of”; theology is the kind of knowing that must be embodied in a life.150 This is Kierkegaard’s point about the importance of subjectivity for “the single individual,” and no amount of outward knowing “about” can summon the inwardness that Christianity demands.
Knowing “of” is the knowing which embodies what is known.151 A characteristic of such knowing is no mere change of mind, but is “a transition in existence” which is “pathos-filled.”152 Johannes Climacus is a pseudonym which Kierkegaard employed to ridicule Hegelian thought and the “intellectualist-myth.” His Concluding Unscientific Postscript carries the subtitle “a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation,”153 suggesting it to be “a study of both passions and concepts.”154 Climacus was against outward objectivity at the point when it excluded subjectivity, and fundamental to subjectivity was pathos, or the passions.155 Kierkegaard used Climacus to argue that when it came to fundamental matters of existence, the ideal of having an “informed opinion” was both impossible and inhuman: a person must choose how she will live. This is because the goalposts are always shifting; a person cannot abstract herself outside of her own existing in order to see what she is to do with her existing.156 Climacus argues that a distinctive of humanity is the need for impassioned commitment that functions alongside reasoned knowledge and gives direction to it in relation to essential matters.157 This is why Climacus’ writing, although carefully logical, is also filled with the pathos appropriate to his use of the subject matter,158 for instance Climacus’ illustration of the madman who sought to prove himself sane by continually repeating the universal objective truth claim “The earth is round.” Such humor is an appropriate companion to Climacus’ argument against those “assistant professors” who would demand a purely objective basis for any knowledge.159
Although Climacus affirms the necessity of pathos, he cannot (as an unbeliever) bring himself to have faith, which another pseudonym regards as “the infinite passion” or “the passion of infinity.”160 In knowing that “no conviction warranted by detached and rational argument [can] simultaneously move the thinker from detachment to attachment, from disinterestedness to interestedness,”161 and that faith is given by God alone, the reader of Climacus is left waiting. This author can draw his readers out of the illusion of outwardness, but he cannot give them what is fundamentally necessary. Kierkegaard understood this gifting to be the work of God alone. Therefore, this is the primary reason for Kierkegaard’s rejection of the use of direct communication in matters relating to essential truth.
Authorship and Outwardness: The Problem of Direct Communication
Direct communication was incongruent with Kierkegaard’s task for a number of reasons. Firstly, as we have discussed in regard to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard saw that the nature of the gospel lends itself to a form of hiddenness. The invitation of Christianity is fragile and personal.162 Therefore, to announce it “directly” transfers the purely subjective and intimate relation of God and the individual into the realm of impersonal objectivity. In other words, it misdirects the direct communication of God as it interferes and reroutes God’s relation to the individual through the speaker. For instance, it becomes possible for a well-intentioned believer who mediates God’s un-mediatable invitation to become a false prophet, even if what they say is true: their speaking reduces Christianity to a matter of outwardness. Thus, the speaker becomes one who speaks in untruth, and the believer believes through untruth.163 The “how” of Christianity is everything.164
In order for a person to speak on God’s behalf and to directly announce the invitation of God in Christ, Kierkegaard understood that such a speaker must have divine authority, which he himself did not have.165 As we saw in the illustration of the King and the humble maiden, only the King could approach his love in order to make himself understood; any interference from the royal courtier would occasion a fatal distortion of the invitation. This is how direct communication misrepresents and ultimately distorts Christian truth.166
Additionally, there is the problem of the illusion of “Christendom.” That is, the people whom Kierkegaard was seeking to address thought themselves to be already Christian. He feared that a direct communication of Christianity would be dismissed by his readers as irrelevant to themselves, so for the sake of “reintroducing Christianity into Christendom,” he abandoned direct communication and instead “approached from behind.”167 The first step of Kierkegaard’s task was to remove “the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts” by employing indirect communication.168
Direct communication was also incongruous for Kierkegaard because it discouraged the critical discernment that he saw as being necessary for those who read his work to become “single individuals.” As a society which reduced life to a matter of “results,” their interest was rather with the views of intellectual giants such as Hegel, who gave such results.169 The hiddenness that Kierkegaard sought to communicate, however, was concerned just as much with the how as the what, and such a focus on results was therefore at odds with Kierkegaard’s task. If Kierkegaard was to directly communicate arguments which opposed such objectivity and perhaps argued against Hegel by employing a similar didactical form to him, there would