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.
