“Form” and “content” relate to Kierkegaard’s categories of “actuality” and “ideality,” used well by Joel Rasmussen in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s “Christomorphic Poetics,” in Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, e.g., 48: “If poetry reconciles an imperfect actuality to its perfect ideal in a merely imaginative fashion, then a reconciliation between an individual’s imperfect actuality and the divine ideal for that individual should be achievable not through writing poetry but by living poetically.”
103. Kierkegaard, “Two Discourses,” 418–26.
104. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 202–7.
105. Ibid., 206, cf. John 14:6.
106. This will become clearer through our discussion below in 1.3: “Christomorphic Poetics.”
Part I: The Content
This section gives an overview of some key concepts of Kierkegaard’s that are common themes throughout the authorship. I will survey the concepts of outwardness, “the single individual,” and truth in particular, giving special emphasis to how the concept of hiddenness relates to each. Because Kierkegaard valued the congruence between form and content, we cannot understand the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship apart from its content. Like the analogy of the “circle” or “spiral” in hermeneutics where there is an ongoing interaction between pre-understandings and encountering a text, the student of Kierkegaard must constantly go between what is said and how it is said in order to approach a full understanding.107 Firstly, we will briefly explore these concepts themselves in order to illustrate how they impact Kierkegaard’s authorship of hiddenness.
107. In this way, what the student engages with is not only the subject matter, but also the form in which it is presented. For a critical engagement with the concept of “hermeneutical circle” in relation to Friedrick Schleiermacher, see Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 103–14; see also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 292–93; though such an understanding needs to be broadened to include considering language as a “form of life,” where the entire communicative act is considered. For instance, see Wittgenstein, Investigations, 19, §11; and Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” in Philosophical Investigations, 327, §235, as well as the field of pragmatics and speech-act theory. This matter is far beyond the scope of this work.
1.1 The Problems of Outwardness and Direct Communication
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
