Kierkegaard, indirect communication, and religious truth

Abstract

Kierkegaard says in the Postscript that "the religious individual can never use direct communication."1 Religious individuals, if they are to communicate at all, must use what he calls "indirect communication." Occasionally philosophers say something of significance; and if one allows oneself to be confronted by Kierkegaard's denial of direct communication in religion, it is hard not to sense that he has touched a nerve. Yet one can still be unclear what the significance is, let alone whether Kierkegaard is right. In fact, it seems to me, that Kierkegaard's denial, as well as his counterpoised affirmation of the need of indirect communication, is right and in more than one way. To begin to see why Kierkegaard is right, however, we need to understand the difference between direct and indirect communication. In the Postscript direct communication belongs to "objective thinking;" it is used to communicate what one believes, what one understands the facts to be. Indirect communication belongs to and communicates subjectivity; and subjectivity relates to the how of an individual's belief, to a particular individual's inwardness and "personal appropriation."2 Direct communication, as exposition and setting forth, changes minds, while indirect communication changes lives, as one commentator has put it.3 Why can't the religious individual use direct communication? One reason that Kierkegaard gives is that the religious individual is "constantly in process of becoming inwardly." Another reason that he gives, closely related to the first, is that "direct communication presupposes certainty" and, for Kierkegaard, "certainty is impossible for anyone in process of becoming." However there is to my mind a clearer, more decisive reason available to Kierkegaard in the terms of his own categories. If I understand Kierkegaard rightly, for him all communication involves what he calls "reduplication." In direct communication an idea or proposition is communicated, or reduplicated, from one person to another. Here it is sufficient for one person plainly to tell another. As Kierkegaard says, "when one man sets forth something and another acknowledges the same, word for word, it is taken for granted that they are in agreement." It is regarding direct communication of objective truth that ceteris paribus we can reason "I told him, so he knows." This