Kierkegaard's central
problematic was how to become a Christian in Christendom. The task
was most difficult for the well-educated, since prevailing educational and cultural institutions
tended to produce stereotyped members of "the crowd" rather than to allow individuals to
discover their own unique identities. This problem was compounded by the fact that Denmark
had recently and very rapidly been transformed from a feudal society into a capitalist society.
Universal elementary education, large-scale migration from rural areas into cities, and greatly
increased social mobility meant that the social structure changed from a rigidly hierarchical one
to a relatively "horizontal" one. In this context it became increasingly difficult to "become
who
you are" for two reasons: (i) social identities were unusually fluid; and (ii) there was a
proliferation of normalizing institutions which produced pseudo-individuals.
Given this problematic
in this social context Kierkegaard perceived a need to invent a form of
communication which would not produce stereotyped identities. On the contrary, he needed a
form of rhetoric which would force people back onto their own resources, to take
responsibility for their own existential choices, and to become who they are beyond their
socially imposed identities. In this undertaking Kierkegaard was inspired by the figure of
Socrates, whose incessant irony undermined all knowledge claims that were taken for granted
or unreflectively inherited from traditional culture. In his dissertation On the Concept of Irony
with constant reference to Socrates Kierkegaard argued that the historical Socrates used his
irony in order to facilitate the birth of subjectivity in his interlocutors. Because they were
constantly forced to abandon their pat answers to Socrates' annoying questions, they had to
begin to think for themselves and to take individual responsibility for their claims about
knowledge and value.
Kierkegaard sought
to provide a similar service for his own contemporaries. He used irony,
parody, satire, humor, and deconstructive techniques in order to make conventionally accepted
forms of knowledge and value untenable. He was a gadfly -- constantly irritating his
contemporaries with discomforting thoughts. He was also a midwife -- assisting at the birth of
individual subjectivity by forcing his contemporaries to think for themselves. His art of
communication became "the art of taking away" since he thought his audience suffered
from
too much knowledge rather than too little.
Hegelianism promised
to make absolute knowledge available by virtue of a science of logic.
Anyone with the capacity to follow the dialectical progression of the purportedly transparent
concepts of Hegel's logic would have access to the mind of God (which for Hegel was
equivalent to the logical structure of the universe). Kierkegaard thought this to be the hubristic
attempt to build a new tower of Babel, or a scala paradisi -- a dialectical ladder by which
humans can climb with ease up to heaven. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert this dialectic by
seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of seeing scientific knowledge as the means
of human redemption, he regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking
to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for knowledge. Instead of
seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize the
absolute transcendence by God of all human categories. Instead of setting himself up as a
religious authority, Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to undermine his authority
as an author and to place responsibility for the existential significance to be derived from his
texts squarely on the reader.
Kierkegaard distanced
himself from his texts by a variety of devices which served to
problematize the authorial voice for the reader. He used pseudonyms in many of his works
(both overtly aesthetic ones and overtly religious ones). He partitioned the texts into prefaces,
forewords, interludes, postscripts, appendices. He assigned the "authorship" of parts of texts
to
different pseudonyms, and invented further pseudonyms to be the editors or compilers of these
pseudonymous writings. Sometimes Kierkegaard appended his name as author, sometimes as
the person responsible for publication, sometimes not at all. Sometimes Kierkegaard would
publish more than one book on the same day. These simultaneous books embodied strikingly
contrasting perspectives. He also published whole series of works simultaneously, viz. the
pseudonymous works on the one hand and on the other hand the Edifying Discourses
published under his own name.
All of this play
with narrative point of view, with contrasting works, and with contrasting internal
partitions within individual works leaves the reader very disoriented. In combination with the
incessant play of irony and Kierkegaard's predilection for paradox and semantic opacity, the
text becomes a polished surface for the reader in which the prime meaning to be discerned is
the reader's own reflection. Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma
by rote. It is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing h/er passionate subjective
relationship to an object which can never be known, but only believed in. This belief is offensive
to reason, since it only exists in the face of the absurd (the paradox of the eternal, immortal,
infinite God being incarnated in time as a finite mortal).
Kierkegaard's "method
of indirect communication" was designed to sever the reliance of the
reader on the authority of the author and on the received wisdom of the community. The reader
was to be forced to take individual responsibility for knowing who s/he is and for knowing
where s/he stands on the existential, ethical and religious issues raised in the texts.
Kierkegaard's "inverted
Christian dialectic" was designed not to make the word of God easier
to assimilate, but to establish more clearly the absolute distance that separates human beings
from God. This was in order to emphasize that human beings are absolutely reliant on God's
grace for salvation.
1. David Borenstein
