carried this out through a dialectical form which worked two opposite concepts (thesis, antithesis) into a synthesis, thus eliminating contradiction.29 Kierkegaard argued that such an approach worked from the assumption that nothing was beyond its grasp, but its fundamental weakness was its own impossibility, since it only survived in the fantastic realm of objectivity and thus had no traction in actual existence. The irony was that Hegel had effectively philosophized himself out of existence, thus creating an impossibility which completely negated his work, for how can such an author see or speak (let alone with any authority) if he himself does not exist?30
In such fashion, Hegel and his followers negated existence for the sake of “pure being” and “pure thinking.”31 Kierkegaard understood these ideas as illusory (and at the very least useless) for a human being. A person’s condition is always constituted by existence in time which is a process that eludes finality (hence Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming and striving as opposed to static being).32 So Kierkegaard sought to remove such illusions that enslaved his fellow Danes to untruth in the form of a kind of intellectual mob mentality, and instead sought to re-emphasize the responsibility and spiritual reality of every person as an existing “single individual.” It would not do for him to mimic the systematic and coolly logical form of Hegel (or much of modern scholarship for that matter), for he would just be replacing one illusory system for another (fighting fire with fire)33 and would be at risk of becoming a victim of Hegelian synthesis himself. Instead, he sought to subvert the formal conventions of writing in order to help realize his task of awakening “the single individual” in his reader. He achieved this through hiding himself in his authorship.34
This hiddenness was undertaken in the hope that his reader would, as we presume of Kierkegaard himself, meet God in the hiddenness of her own heart. Therefore, my thesis is this:
It was through Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel that his authorship took the form of hiddenness.
The underlying question that has driven me in this research of Kierkegaard and his work is to do with the appropriate relation between form and content: How does the nature of truth affect or impinge on its communication? In particular, how does the Christian claim of Jesus as truth affect a person who attempts to speak truthfully? What does it mean to speak as a Christian? If Christ is the truth, how is a believer to speak (or write) of him? Through examining Kierkegaard’s authorship, I will present him as one who understood this tension and attempted to embody Christian truth in his own authorship.
Although the writing of this book is undertaken in the pretense of demonstrating a level of “mastery” over the subject material (that being the work of Søren Kierkegaard), I will attempt to undertake this work in truth by inverting this expectation, instead demonstrating its mastery over myself and this book. As has been noted most gracefully in the foreword and preface to the recent posthumous publication of Paul Holmer’s work Kierkegaard and the Truth,35 Holmer recognized the existential difficulty in attempting to write about Kierkegaard. Such anguish is indicative of a Kierkegaardian commentator’s faithfulness to Kierkegaard. As one attempting to be Kierkegaard’s reader, and therefore more than this—a penitent before God,36 I myself am wrestling over the writing of this book. So in light of this, I will attempt to communicate Kierkegaard’s form of communication in a way that is likewise “in truth.”
This work is not written in an attempt to summarize Søren Kierkegaard’s life or thought, nor to dissect him as an object of interest on the altar of objective, universal knowing. Rather, it is an attempt to learn from Kierkegaard’s works as they addressed his context and to present him as an example of a Christian communicator. Through demonstrating Kierkegaard’s literary genius on behalf of the gospel, I hope that we may learn how to communicate “in truth.”
Methodology
The beginning is not what one begins with but what one arrives at, and one reaches it by going backward.37
This book will not employ a systematic description or definition of terms and ideas used by Kierkegaard. To do so would be to import a philosophical or academic system that is foreign to his work.38 Instead, as a demonstration of my mastery “over” the “subject matter” of Kierkegaard’s authorship, I will seek to emulate (in the fashion also adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein)39 Kierkegaard’s tendency to demonstrate a term’s meaning by its use.40 In this way, I will attempt to read Kierkegaard according to his own terms.41 However, in saying this, an outline of my own pre-understandings of the following terms could be helpful:
• “Hiddenness” and its derivatives are being used in this work in a sense similar to Kierkegaard’s use of these words, especially in his concept “hidden inwardness.” These words carry the sense of something being kept from direct observation or understanding.
• “Authorship” is typically in reference to Kierkegaard’s “authorship proper”: those works outlined in Point of View,42 along with the works of Anti-Climacus, which contribute to Kierkegaard’s task.
• “Believer,” “learner,” “reader,” “hearer,” “student,” etc. have been used throughout as interchangeable terms for a person engaging with either Kierkegaard’s works, truth, or a matter presented to them by another.
• “Truth” is largely being used throughout as a reference to essential truth—that is, truth concerning ethics and religion.43
Much of what is written here presumes Christian faith, and Kierkegaard argues that a true depth of knowing Christianity requires the passion of faith. I therefore hope to demonstrate here the importance of an inside reading of Kierkegaard.
The reader will also come to notice the layered and repetitive form of this book. The themes we will explore cannot be easily argued in a linear fashion but must be approached by many different routes.44 This is a common characteristic of Kierkegaard’s work, and I will employ such repetition also. This approach carries the advantage that it fosters a greater understanding in the reader, for by going too quickly we can miss something.45 My book therefore is less a linear argument, and more of an exploration that paints a picture, the parts of which are interdependent and cannot be accurately understood apart from the whole.
Structure
In this work I attempt to pay closer attention to the how of Kierkegaard, rather than the what.46 I therefore explore and emphasize the communication strategies and out-workings of Kierkegaard’s writings, working from what is said in his own explicit articulation of his authorial task in Point of View.47 In order to do this, I touch on many key concepts found throughout the content of the
