Читать книгу The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard - Jacob Sawyer - Страница 10

Introduction

Kierkegaard’s task was directly opposed to outwardness. Therefore, he saw direct communication as being unhelpful and largely opposed to his task. In this section we begin with an overview of Kierkegaard’s use of the terms “Christendom” and “the crowd” and how he used them in reference to his outwardly focused society. To illustrate, we will contrast these ideas with Kierkegaard’s use of Abraham, in order to understand the dangers of outwardness in regard to making oneself understood. We will then explore in greater detail Kierkegaard’s problem with outwardness in his critique of Hegelian thought, contrasting this with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the inwardness of a person’s relation with God. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the incompatibility of direct communication with Kierkegaard’s task of hiddenness.

Christendom and the Crowd

For Kierkegaard the most problematic manifestation of the danger of outwardness was the religious culture of Denmark which claimed to be Christian, named by him as “Christendom.” This social phenomenon perpetuated the illusion that outward ritual and Christian practice (particularly the collective identity of Denmark naming itself “a Christian nation”) established a member of the Danish public as Christian and that relating to God occurred en masse.108 Kierkegaard saw outwardness being valued in Christendom, with little thought given to inward subjectivity.109 In contrast, Kierkegaard understood Christianity to be entirely a matter of inwardness, and therefore such a fixation on the outward was antithetical to the gospel.110

As Climacus’ caricature comically portrays, there was little acceptance for those who doubted their automatic Christian status:

If [a doubter] were married, his wife would tell him, “Hubby, darling, where did you ever pick up such a notion? How can you not be a Christian? You are Danish, aren’t you? Doesn’t the geography book say that the predominant religion in Denmark is Lutheran-Christian? You aren’t a Jew, are you, or a Mohammedan? What else would you be, then? It is a thousand years since paganism was superseded; so I know you aren’t a pagan. Don’t you tend to your work in the office as a good civil servant; aren’t you a good subject in a Christian nation, in a Lutheran-Christian state? So of course you are a Christian.”111

In his short essay “For the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual,’” Kierkegaard named “the crowd” as untruth.112 This is particularly in reference to the press-culture of Copenhagen in his day where feuds of the literary elite were fought using various pseudonyms—the most destructive of which Kierkegaard claimed was “Anonymous.”113 With this disembodied mask, any person could say whatever he wished, abdicating all responsibility of bearing what was said in his own life.114 As Kierkegaard went on to explain, such a surrender of individual responsibility gives up one’s birthright to be a “single individual”115—to be their own person before God—and instead reduces himself to a member of “the crowd.” Such a fracture between form and content, actuality and ideality, words and life was not only restricted to the press, but was the criticism which Kierkegaard leveled at his entire society, especially the intellectual elite.116

“The crowd” was Kierkegaard’s most vulgar reference to the problems of the outwardness of his society. It is here that a person measured himself according to the perceptions of his peers and does his best to make himself intelligible to those who surround him. Kierkegaard strove to show that this was sinful, in two key ways. The first was that it replaced God with the idol of “the crowd,” where the world became a person’s object of concern.117 Instead of deriving ethics, truth, and their identity from God, “the crowd” became the authority for the person.118 It also abdicates responsibility—for Kierkegaard this was particularly in the form of negating the importance of integrity between one’s words and actions. For Kierkegaard, this was a definition of sin.119

Ethics and Understanding

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard explored the biblical story of Abraham being called by God to sacrifice his only son. Kierkegaard suggested to the reader that she has likely forgotten the real “shock-factor” of the story—that is, that Abraham went beyond ethics and therefore beyond intelligibility in order to be obedient to God and become “the father of the faith.”120 His “risk of obedience” meant that he was willing to be seen as the murderer of his own son.121 Kierkegaard reminded his reader that Abraham’s role within this story is too often only seen retrospectively as the exemplary undertaking of a test of faith, without seeing the depth of anxiety and horror that Abraham experienced in order to be obedient to God.122 Kierkegaard sought to reveal the incompatibility of Christian scripture (and its holding up Abraham as an heroic example) with that of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.123 Abraham cannot be understood through the universal language of ethics; Abraham is alone before God.124

The horror with which Kierkegaard sought to reacquaint his reader was already in the biblical story: how Abraham was called to sacrifice his only son, “Isaac whom he loved,” by the very God who had given him. Abraham could not make this command (which was hidden in his own heart) intelligible to others, as they would simply dismiss this call as a dangerous construction of an unhealthy mind and attempt to stop him from fulfilling this command. Abraham was utterly alone before a terrible God, and the journey to Mt Moriah took three days riding on the back of a donkey.125 As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes De Silentio comments, “no one was as great as Abraham; who is able to understand him?”126

De Silentio discusses this story in terms of a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Abraham did not simply dismiss his understanding of what was right and wrong and all reason in favor of a “higher” ethics of divine command,127 but instead put this understanding on hold.128 De Silentio’s portrayal of Abraham is that he somehow believed that God would make this action right, but could not foresee how. Abraham therefore acted in faith that God would be the one who would make things right; he acted out of the belief that justice was fundamentally in the hands of God and not in his own.129 He did not abandon ethics, but instead left ethics in the hands of God, trusting that he would receive Isaac back from the dead, whether in his own lifetime or not.130 John Davenport therefore argues that “the main point of Fear and Trembling . . . is to present the essence of ‘faith’ as eschatological trust.”131

The key point is that Abraham’s anguish was hidden—it was an inward reality which could not be justified outside of his own subjective call by God. Abraham was alone. He could not appeal to the universal common ground of ethics to make himself understood by anyone, unlike De Silentio’s portrayal of “the tragic hero.” For such a tragic hero, to make a sacrifice for “the greater good” (e.g., for the salvation of an entire people) is all too understandable and praiseworthy to the onlooking public. It is an outward act of heroism and easily gains the sympathy and admiration of “the crowd.”132 The anguish of Abraham’s faith (that he “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”)133 was completely subjective: it was hidden.

Fear and Trembling and the Spheres of Existence

A key series of concepts from Kierkegaard are his three “spheres of existence” which permeate his literature.134 They are a way of categorizing different “life-views” according to a person’s telos. The first sphere is the aesthetic: that pertaining to the immediate and the sensory. It is not necessarily vulgar, but is limited to being concerned with the surface experiences of life. The second is the ethical: those who are concerned with doing what is right, that which is required of them either by God, society or both. The third is the religious: that “single individual” who is concerned with God and God alone.135

In light of our discussion on Fear and Trembling, the sphere called “the ethical” can be dangerous to “the religious” because it can take a person away from her own subjective relationship with God. This happens when an individual substitutes their own “hidden inwardness” with the values and expectations of society: thus pursuing the idol of the outward, rather than God alone. In this sense, ethics based on the conventions of society can often be marred by self-righteousness, or the need to be esteemed by either the self or a neighbor, rather than by God. This is the danger of the ethical sphere for Christianity: the danger of outwardness. The ethical is understandable, justifiable, visible—outward. But it has no necessary link to what is inward. For Kierkegaard it was this inwardness that is everything for the Christian. Kierkegaard used Abraham to illustrate the radical nature of living out of the “religious” sphere of life, in which one is answerable to God alone, and which thus carries substantial risks. To be a Christian is to be alone; to be hidden from the understanding of others. To reduce Christianity to a matter of outwardness is to destroy what really counts and to reveal to others what must remain hidden in God.136

The Danger of Worldliness

A persistent theme throughout Kierkegaard’s religious works is the danger of worldliness and fearing “the world” instead of fearing God.137 That is, the danger of living according to the logic and expectations of “the world” or “the crowd” rather than according to what God requires of an individual.138 Kierkegaard saw his society as a mob, chasing what was fashionable intellectually. He advocated for each person to take responsibility for owning her own beliefs and understandings. Instead of measuring herself by others and popular philosophical positions, Kierkegaard claimed that true selfhood was found in relating to God and God alone.139

Kierkegaard typically named Hegel as the figurehead of the trend of systematic speculative thought and the pseudo-Christianity that was derived from it. Followers in the Danish public were more concerned with making Christianity comprehensible to fashionable thinking than they were with God himself. They sought security in “the crowd” rather than their own hidden relationship with God which was completely removed from public concerns. As a corrective, Kierkegaard sought to emphasize the gospel which he understood to speak to the individual and not “the crowd.”140 That is, the individual is to live in the religious sphere by being concerned with the approval of God alone.

Kierkegaard frequently discredited attempts to establish Christianity externally, such as through appeals to the historical sciences.141 This is true also of his signed Works of Love, where he often commented on the illusion of the external in terms of ethics. For instance, he wrote that the act of mercy is an internal matter of the heart and is completely irrelevant to the external ways in which it manifests itself. The act of mercy is equally available to the poor as well as to the rich, and the external manifestation of this inwardness is an illusion and can only serve to distract and tempt one away from the inward truth of mercy.142 Kierkegaard’s concept of “the single individual” is completely inward (subjective), and the only relevance or truth of Christianity is one that is true for “the single individual.” The reduction of Christianity to the outwardness of doctrinal, intellectual or systematic forms is fundamentally flawed. Christianity is only rooted and grounded in faith—hidden in the heart of the individual believer. Pathos (the appropriate movement of the heart) must accompany and characterize the Christian life. As Holmer claims: “to have knowledge of God you must fear him and you must love him. There is no knowledge of God otherwise.”143

Hegel and the Heartless System

Søren Kierkegaard was deeply disturbed by the way in which Hegelian thought was being used to subsume Christianity within itself.144 Such “speculative thought” placed its emphasis on the construction of an exhaustive, all-inclusive system which could understand all things—including human existence and the actions of God.145 Kierkegaard saw in this the danger of reducing all of reality to the outward, with no space left for inward reflection and a person’s own subjective existence.

Kierkegaard linked outwardness with immediacy, and saw immediacy as an illusion which inhibited interaction with the deeper reality of the eternal—that which only could be reached by subjective inwardness.146 Kierkegaard understood that speculative thought with its emphasis on objectivity had its 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 be a violent incongruence between the content and form of Kierkegaard’s communication. He would fundamentally contradict what was communicated in how he communicated it. So in order to advocate for subjectivity and to overcome the difficulties of communicating Christianity, Kierkegaard sought to communicate the truth of hiddenness in a suitably hidden form: that is, indirectly.170

Conclusion

In this chapter I have outlined a number of problems which Kierkegaard associated with outwardness in relation to Christianity. For Kierkegaard, the outwardness of “Christendom” and “the crowd” were incompatible with the (infinitely) high demands of Christianity and actually served as temptations or distractions from living and communicating essential truth. Kierkegaard emphasized, through the story of Abraham and Isaac, the demand of inwardness for the believer and the incommunicable mystery of one’s own hidden relationship with God as a “single individual.” He also emphasized the need for an embodied knowing regarding Christianity and therefore rejected the “intellectualist-myth,” and its form of direct communication. In order to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom,” Kierkegaard understood that his task must not only address these dangers of outwardness, but actively oppose them in the very form that his corrective took: that is, a form of hiddenness.

108. See especially Kierkegaard, “For the Dedication,” 105–12.

109. That Kierkegaard later saw his fellow Danes using his concept of hidden inwardness to justify their own outward inaction will be discussed below in 1.2: “Hidden Inwardness As Individualism?”

110. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 31.

111. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 50–51.

112. Søren Kierkegaard, “For the Dedication,” 105–12.

113. See Storm, “II: Kierkegaard’s Authorial Dialectic”; Pattison, “Kierkegaard as Feuilleton Writer,” 126 n. 2; see also Mackey, Kierkegaard, 247.

114. Kierkegaard, “For the Dedication,” 110–11.

115. This concept of Kierkegaard’s is to be taken at face value, and will be discussed further below.

116. This is most clearly seen in the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

117. See “The Anxiety Caused By Being in Two Minds,” originally from 1848’s Christian Discourses, published as chapter 9 in Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, 165–77.

118. Kierkegaard, “For the Dedication,” 109.

119. Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 52, 58, 71; see also Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 280–81.

120. “There were countless generations that knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word. How many did it make sleepless?” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 28).

121. The phrase “risk of obedience” is taken from Rae, “The Risk of Obedience,” 308.

122. “Kierkegaard intends the reader to experience in Fear and Trembling the tension of truly Christian ethics” (Hall, “Self-deception,” 40).

123. See Rae, “The Risk of Obedience,” 313.

124. Cf. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 139.

125. “Some understand the story of Abraham in another way. They praise God’s mercy for giving him Isaac once again, the whole thing was just a trial. A trial—that can say a lot or little, yet the whole thing is as quickly done with as said. One mounts a winged horse, that very instant one is on the mountain in Moriah, the same instant one sees the ram. One forgets that Abraham rode on an ass, which can keep up no more than a leisurely pace, that he had a three-day journey, that he needed time to chop the firewood, bind Isaac, and sharpen the knife” (ibid., 59–60).

126. Ibid., 13.

127. See John J. Davenport on an introduction to a (mis)reading of Fear and Trembling by Alasdair MacIntyre and others, who reduce “Kierkegaardian faith to blind fanaticism” in “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling,” 196–98.

128. “Problema I” in Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 62–79.

129. Contra the humanistic ethics of Kant: “The implication of Kant’s confidence is that the deliverances of practical reason enable us to know good from evil with incontrovertible assurance, and further, that this is just the same thing as seeing with the eye of God. One might imagine it possible to claim the support of Genesis 3.5 for Kant’s position, ‘when you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’ But that, of course, is the serpent’s argument.” (Rae, “The Risk of Obedience,” 313).

130. Cf. Heb 11:19.

131. Davenport, “Faith as Eschatological Trust,” 198, italics author’s own.

132. “When at the decisive moment Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus heroically overcome their pain, have heroically given up the loved one, and have only the outward deed to perform, then never a noble soul in the world will there be but sheds tears of sympathy for their pain, tears of admiration for their deed” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 68).

133. Rom 4:3, cf. Gen 15:6.

134. The work dedicated to these “spheres” or “stages” is Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way.

135. Sylvia Walsh helpfully points out that each progressive stage of existence does not exclude matters of the lower, but reforms them. Therefore, the religious is concerned with such things as art and doing what is right, but such things are reworked and reoriented to the ultimate ends of serving God. See her Living Poetically. For a more detailed introduction into Kierkegaard’s “spheres” or “stages of existence,” see Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 11–16.

136. Such aloneness and an inability to make oneself understood is what Kierkegaard himself claims to have experienced in his authorial task. See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 75.

137. E.g., Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 124, 187; and Part II in ch 10: “Silence, Obedience, and Joy,” in Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, 196–213 originally published in 1849 as The Lily of the Field and the Bird Under Heaven.

138. “To know God requires that we become ‘Godly.’ We must learn to fear him, to be observant in his presence, and then we also realize what he is. For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of our Lord, Jesus Christ, is not truly known if he is not feared. This is why Kierkegaard said, and I believe truly, that Christianity requires inwardness. For fearing God means that the fears of others and of the world are cast out; but more, it becomes plainly silly to defy the Almighty God in any respect whatsoever” (Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 211).

139. C. Stephen Evans rightly argues that Kierkegaard advocated for a selfhood being relational, but only through the God-relationship: “Not only is God the ontological foundation of the self; God is also the highest ethical task, in the sense that the highest form of selfhood requires a conscious relation to God.” This then forms the basis for a healthy relating to others: “. . . though the God-relation is not merely a means to bettering human social arrangements, it ultimately must be seen as functioning so as to humanize those arrangements.” It is in this way that Evans successfully deals with the critique of individualism so frequently leveled against Kierkegaard, such as that by Buber and others (Evans, “Who Is the Other?,” 272–73).

140. “ . . . when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 31).

141. This is most particularly the case in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

142. See part 2, chapter 7: “Mercifulness, a Work of Love, Even if It Can Give Nothing and Is Capable of Doing Nothing,” in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 292–305.

143. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 25; also: “Being religious is, however, being involved, being concerned, being a qualitatively different person. If a language claim, even about God, is believed to be true, there is nothing in that kind of assent to its claim that is productive of religiousness” (Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 69).

144. Many scholars now see that the primary target of Kierkegaard’s satire are Danish Hegelians, not so much Hegel himself. For instance, see Poole, Kierkegaard, 2; and Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations.

145. See Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 100.

146. See Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 124–25.

147. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; see also Antony Aumann on the work of the Danish Hegelian H. L. Martensen in “Kierkegaard’s Case,” chap. 2: “The Speculative Project.”

148. There are innumerable parallels here with Michael Polanyi’s thought, though he does not refer to Kierkegaard in his major work: Personal Knowledge. Such a link could be made via the thought of Bernard Lonergan, who shares affinities with both Polanyi and Kierkegaard. See Fitzpatrick, “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” 64–74; Morelli, Anxiety.

149. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 120.

150. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 25. “In so far as Christianity can be ‘said’ at all, theology and Scripture say it. But what is therein said, be it the words of eternal life, be it creeds, or be it the words of Jesus Himself, we must note that like grammar and logic, their aim is not that we repeat the words. Theology must also be absorbed, and when it is, the hearer is supposed to become Godly.”

151. As a negative example: “Therefore an understanding of evil (however much one tries to make himself and others think that one can keep himself entirely pure, that there is a pure understanding of evil) nevertheless involves an understanding with evil” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 266, emphasis author’s own).

152. Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 46.

153. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1, my emphasis.

154. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 4.

155. Kierkegaard’s use of “passion” is articulated by C. Stephen Evans as being akin to the notion of “value”: an enduring care that “must be developed and acquired,” rather than a fleeting feeling. “The individual does decide for himself, but he cannot value what he knows is valueless; there must be a basis or root for his caring concern. Passions must be ‘called forth’” (Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 39).

156. Hence Kierkegaard’s repeated repudiation of the attempt to view humanity sub specie aeterni (“from the aspect of eternity”). See also Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 196: “Here it is not forgotten, even for a single moment, that the subject is existing, and that existing is a becoming, and that truth as the identity of thought and being is therefore a chimera of abstraction and truly only a longing of creation, not because truth is not an identity, but because the knower is an existing person, and thus truth cannot be an identity for him as long as he exists . . .”; this necessity of choice is also the big idea behind Kierkegaard’s first key work Either/Or.

157. Just as mistrust is “a misuse of knowledge . . . Love is the very opposite of mistrust, and yet is initiated in the same knowledge. In knowledge the two are, so to speak, not distinguished from each other (in the ultimate understanding knowledge is indifferent); only in conclusion and decision, in faith (to believe all things, to believe nothing), are they directly opposite to one another” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 214–16).

158. However, as we shall see, this is not a demonstration of a Christian use.

159. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 194–95.

160. As voiced by De Silentio: “Faith is the highest passion in a human being” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 151).

161. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 3.

162. In Kierkegaard’s words, “infinitely gentle” (Point of View, 16).

163. “Just as important as the truth, and of the two the even more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth” Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 247.

164. Cf. Ibid., I:202; Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 3/3684, X3 A 431, n.d., 1850.

165. E.g., Kierkegaard, Point of View, 12 n. 32. This phrase itself acted as an indirect critique of the institution of ordinancy in the Danish state church. For a more extensive discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of authority and its relation to existence-communication in ethico-religious matters, see Whittaker, “Kierkegaard on the Concept of Authority,” 83–101; Cf. Kierkegaard’s understanding of “witnessing.” See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1/670, X1 A 235, n.d., 1849.

166. To use an example from modern day Christianity, we can see the problems of such direct communication of Christianity when a speaker gives a direct invitation to another person. The minister says, “Christ stands at the door of your heart: repent and believe! Put up your hand; come up the front and declare Jesus as your own personal savior!” and the church-goer feels a quickening of his heart, tears in his eyes, and submits to this invitation. If the minister is not commissioned by the spirit of God, then these symptoms are merely outwardness and have no correlation to the inward work of God within the individual.

167. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 42–43. As he helpfully illustrates elsewhere, if a person is starving to death but their mouth is so full of food that she cannot eat, the first thing to do is not to give her more food but rather to remove the food in her mouth. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 275.

168. We shall explore this strategy further below in 2.1.

169. This can be seen most clearly in his discussion of subjectivity in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For example, “objective thinking invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers, subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result, partly because this belongs to him, since he possesses the way, partly because he as existing is continually in the process of becoming, as is every human being who has not permitted himself to be tricked into becoming objective, into inhumanly becoming speculative thought” (73).

170. See also “§ 3: The Impossibility of Direct Communication,” in Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 133–36.