Founder: Professor Wolfe Mays

Michel Henry’s affection for and dependence upon Søren Kierkegaard at various points

in his career can be well-documented, and the broadest and most elementary purpose of my paper today is to initiate a conversation on the rapport between these two thinkers, both of whom everyone in this room knows well.[1] From the beginning of his career in The Essence of Manifestation all the way to the posthumous texts, Henry provides his readers with extensive, sympathetic, and always idiosyncratic readings of Kierkegaard. Nicole Hatem, who has done extensive work on this intersection and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude does not exaggerate when she says, “…there is not one of [Henry’s] great works that, explicitly or not, does not refer to the Danish philosopher;” I also second her observation that the more straightforward Henry is about his debt to Kierkegaard in any given interaction with his thought, the less scrupulously Kierkegaardian in spirit he is, while where he becomes the most (dare I say) “religiously” Kierkegaardian the name of Kierkegaard himself is less and less likely to appear.[2] Indeed, the conviction underlying what I will present today is that I Am the Truth is a nearly point-for-point analogue to the logic of Philosophical Fragments.[3]

For Henry the question “Can the truth be learned?” is as much an aporia[4] as it was for Kierkegaard,[5] and both thinkers ask this question not in order to solve some abstract or pedantic epistemological issue but because the truth they seek is the one that is appropriate to human beings and their salvation.[6] This paper examines Henry’s and Kierkegaard’s answers to the question of how the truth is learned and in the course of this examination we will necessarily have occasion to compare the two thinkers’ accounts of paradox and the phenomenality of Christ, two themes that bring into focus the nature of truth in both thinkers. I will begin with a thorough analysis of Henry’s theory of two truths, one of the world and the other of life. These two truths collide in the crucial eleventh chapter of I Am the Truth, which I will then examine with a view to elucidating Henry’s understanding of paradox and the role it plays in his phenomenology. Finally I will entertain some questions for his theory that I think a Kierkegaardian might raise.

In I Am the Truth Henry tells us very early on that “the concept of truth is twofold, designating both what shows itself and the fact of self-showing” (IT, 13/[22], emphasis original in the French but does not appear in the English translation). In language that will prove significant in a few minutes by comparison to Kierkegaard, Henry goes on to say that “The fact of self-showing is as indifferent to what shows itself as is the light to what it illuminates—shining, according to Scripture, on the just as well as the unjust. But the fact of self-showing is indifferent to all that shows itself only because by its nature it differs from all that, whatever it may be” (IT, 13/[22]). Indeed the fact of self-showing, phenomenality, differs so stridently from what is shown, phenomena, that between these two it is the latter that Henry designates as “the essence of truth” (IT, 13/[22]).

On the basis of this outline he presents us with what is at first a very soft, seemingly uncontroversial conclusion: “If it is in the very essence of truth—in the sense of a pure manifestation, of a pure revelation—that the fact of self-showing consists, then everything that shows itself is true only in a secondary sense. It is only because the pure act of appearing takes place, and that, in it, the truth deploys its essence beforehand, that everything that appears is susceptible of doing so…Thus any truth concerning things, being, as the Greeks said—any ontic truth, refers back to a pure phenomenological truth that it presupposes, refers back to the pure act of self-showing, considered in itself and as such” (IT, 13/[22]). The pure act of self-showing as such is the primary sense of truth then at work in Henry’s phenomenology. Dependent on nothing else, it “is a truth that differs in no way from what is true…a substance whose whole essence is to appear” (IT, 25/[36]).

There are two precise points of contrast between the two forms of truth that should be carefully distinguished. “Self-revelation, when it concerns the essence of Life, means, on the one hand, that it is Life that achieves the revelation, that reveals—but, on the other hand, that what Life reveals is itself” (IT, 29/[42]). Again, two points to hold in mind from this crucial passage. First, it is life that has the power to itself reveal, because there is no power “behind” life that is responsible for allowing it to reveal as it does. Put another way, “It is truth itself in its very deployment that makes something true” (IT, 23/[35]). Second, self-showing shows nothing other than itself. So what Henry wants to say here is that life is its own power of showing and its own object of showing. The situation is exactly reversed in the case of the world’s truth. “The world, too, reveals and makes manifest, but within the ‘outside,’ casting a thing outside itself, as we have seen, in such a way that it never shows itself as other, different, external, in its setting of radical exteriority that is the ‘outside-itself’ of the world. Hence it is doubly exterior: external to the power that makes it manifest—and this is where the contrast between Truth and what it makes true intervenes—and also exterior to itself. It manifests itself only in its own exteriority to itself, emptied of its own substance, unreal…” (IT, 29/[42]).

Within the horizonality of the truth of the world, what is shown is always dependent upon something more primordial, the power of self-showing itself, and is always exterior to that power. What appears in the world does so then in this doubly exterior way, foreign to the power that makes its showing possible and foreign even to itself, evacuated of content as a result of its own mode of showing. Because of its irreducible alienation from the world and its truth, its mode of showing, life is designated as all reality. “…reality resides in Life not merely because what Life experiences, being experienced without distance or any kind of difference, is not emptied of itself within the ‘outside-itself’ of a world, in the noematic unreality of what can only be seen—[but] because what Life experiences is still itself” (IT, 30/[43]).

What defines life is that it does not appear by evacuating itself in order to make an appearance in the world. The experience of life is auto-experience, where what is showing is just the same as what is shown. Life as an invisible phenomenon cannot be known or seen like objects in the world. Living is not possible in the world (IT, 30/[42]). Because it does not appear in the world and has nothing in common with things in the world, nothing in the world is a clue to life, and nothing in the world provides a path to it. This principle is constantly repeated by Henry, discernible in The Essence of Manifestation[7] and throughout the works that follow, changed only by the increasing forcefulness with which Henry advocated it. Thought, the language of the world, the way we evoke the things that appear to us, is incapable of addressing or expressing life. Indeed, Henry asserts in more than one context that even phenomenology, even the words of Scripture, are always as he puts it “too late” to convey the essential.[8]

If the relation of reality to “thought, every comprehension and every possible interpretation in general” is one of “absolute independence” then all forms of appearance that belong to the world are equally worthless (or equally promising depending on your own preference) when it comes to learning the truth. In fact it is comparatively rarely that Henry comes anywhere close to making a claim that the world as such refers to the absolute. The passage I just cited where Henry says that what is shown is true only in a secondary sense might be one such instance. Also there is an occasion in “Material Phenomenology and Language” where he writes, “it is still life which speaks in the world, in the world which secretly speaks the language of life to us. Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei. The world is the speech of God” (MPL, 363).[9]

If the world is the speech of God, then we can hear life or God speaking in the world, perhaps only if we are listening correctly, but nevertheless that it is still possible to hear the words of God spoken in the world. But I do not think this is what Henry means, and this sentence in particular is puzzling because it is clearly out of step with Henry’s usual thinking, which is more accurately reflected I would say in a passage like this one from I Am the Truth: “…coming-into-appearance in the ‘outside-itself’ of the world signifies that it is the thing itself that finds itself cast outside itself. It is fractured, broken, cleaved in two, stripped of its own reality—in such a way that, now deprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world’s Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.” This is a process Henry does not hesitate to call “annihilation” (IT, 19/[28]).

It is arguable that even Christianity, despite the fact that Henry has written an entire book on it, is on the same footing with any other religious conceptuality.[10] One could just as successfully write a book called I Am the Tao or I Am the Buddha. The content of Christianity is of no specific help in determining the essential truth, and any other content would fare just as poorly or just as well. It is not insignificant that in several of his writings Henry mentions a variety of other candidates for expressions that might offer a clue to the truth of life: Kandinsky’s paintings (MPL, 362), music (MPL, 363), and the philosophies of Nietzsche[11] and Marx.[12] Are these expressions of the truth of life? Nothing could either rule in or out that possibility a priori. No one form of expression in the world has any advantage over another in exemplifying life or showing it to us, but apparently, in principle every form of expression has the capacity to do so. We are left then with our aporia: If the truth of life and the truth of the world are completely incommensurable with each other, as Henry says they are, then Can the truth be learned?

The problem is not one of communication. Hearing the words of life is not a matter of going out into the world and finding which words express essential truth, and it’s not a matter of learning how to be better hearers of what is being said “out there.” As living, we are not “out there;” for Henry life does not appear “out there” in the world. Simply put, We are already here, in life. The truth is not foreign to us, not outside, not in the transcendence of the world or in exteriority but the truth of our own immanent being, always already accomplished, always already given to ourselves within the invisible dynamic of transcendental life itself, which remains utterly foreign to, and impenetrable by, thought.[13]

It is this solution to the aporia, with its suspicious similarities to Platonic recollection[14]—the very theory that Kierkegaard seeks to oppose in Philosophical Fragments—that Henry introduces in a passage of crucial interest for our eventual comparison with Kierkegaard. Henry writes: “The phenomenological aporia whereby it is impossible for Christ to show himself in the world as Christ, as the Word of God, destroys any possibility of man having access to Christ, of knowing him as Christ and thus knowing God, as long as man himself continues to be understood as a Being of this world” (IT, 93/[119]). So Henry’s solution to this aporia is to deny that man is “a Being of the world, whether in a naïve or critical sense” (IT, 97/[123]) and to affirm that man is instead a living Son of God. This conception of man as always already inhabiting life and therefore alien to the world is one that he says “overturns from top to bottom the traditional conception [of man] and all its later variants” (IT, 97/[124]).

And with this radical conception Henry thereby circumvents the world, preserving on the one hand his thesis that life or God does not appear in the world and providing the means by which I as Son of God can come to know the truth, namely, by recognizing that all the characteristics that belong to the Christ and follow from a rigorous phenomenological analysis of his unique mode of self-showing also apply to man himself (IT, 98/[124]). “…everything that has been said (and by the Arch-Son himself) about the phenomenological, and hence onotological, heterogeneity of the transcendental Arch-Son in relation to the world and its truth—all those singular propositions that dispense with an appearance in the world and everything that follows from this appearance…all these propositions, we are saying, also concern man himself…” (IT, 98/[125]). It is of interest to me that Henry calls this extension “paradoxical” (IT, 98/[125]), for this term cannot help but presage the theme of chapter 11 of I Am the Truth, to which I now turn my attention.

Chapter 11, entitled “The Paradoxes of Christianity” is I believe an unconscious undoing on Henry’s part of his theory of two truths, affection and self-affection, truth of the world and truth of life. It is in the paradoxes of Christianity that these two truths collide and in which Henry argues Christianity’s founding intuitions are highlighted, the first of which is the duplicity of appearance, the principle that underpins the two truths contrasted in chapters 1 and 2, according to which “…what appears, even if it is the same, nevertheless appears in two different ways, in a dual aspect” (IT, 195/[244]). This much is familiar to us all. However, Henry immediately proceeds to say, “Everything is double, but if what is double—what is offered to us in a double aspect—is in itself one and the same reality, then one of its aspects must be merely an appearance, an image, a copy of reality, but not that reality itself—precisely its double. Two eventualities are then offered: that this double, this exterior appearance, corresponds to reality, or that it does not correspond to it. In the second case, appearance is a trap” (IT, 195/[245]). According to this insurmountable heterogeneity, the principle of the universe is hypocrisy, inasmuch as it is the duplicity of appearance that makes possible outward signs of belief—to use his example—but inward absence of belief (IT, 195/[245]). Only in the realm of life, which is also incidentally the realm of faith (IT, 193/[242]), is duplicity impossible (IT, 196/[246]).

And where there is the possibility of hypocrisy and the absence of faith there is also paradox. “Hypocrisy is the prototype of the paradox whose nature we are trying to elucidate—paradox, like hypocrisy, therefore, takes its principle from the duplicity of appearing. However, in the duplicity of appearing of the same reality, there is something else we have seen: that this reality is real only once, there where it embraces itself in the flesh and in the irreducibility of its pathos—whereas its exterior apparition in the world’s ‘outside-oneself’ is precisely just a simple appearance” (IT, 196/[245]).

Combine then if you will the passage I just read with Henry’s continual insistence on two forms of truth, an opposition he presented as recently as the page before the passage I just read. These two claims that 1.) “…on one side is pathetik and in-ecstatic Life, and on the other, the ecstatic truth of the world” (IT, 195/[244]) and 2.) “reality is real only once” do not together outline the contours of a paradox. On the contrary, they express a complete dissolution of paradox, a collapse of one of the poles of tension into the other, which is designated as absolute. Henry even seems to admit as much with his choice of language on the following page, where in three distinct contexts he asserts a paradoxical teaching of Christianity only to demonstrate how, when seen from the perspective of “pathetik unimpeachable flesh,” the paradox is merely apparent.[15] To examine just one of his examples, Henry says of the declaration of Christ that serves as the title of this book “I am the truth,” that this is a paradox because it situates the criterion of truth not in universality but in absolute singularity. But he immediately retracts this description with these words: “This is also just an apparent paradox if it is true that the first and last possibility of any truth is its self-revelation in the essential Ipseity of a First Living” (IT, 198/[247]). Which is to say, the paradox of Christianity is merely apparent and can be dissolved if examined from the point of view of Henry’s own phenomenological analysis.

Also, recall from chapter 6 that Henry called the sharing of the characteristics of Christ with man in general “paradoxical.” But this paradoxical tension also dissolves if we conclude with Henry that “Ultimately there is only one self-affection, that of absolute Life, because the self-affection in which the ego is given to itself is only absolute Life’s self-affection, which gives the ego to itself by giving life to itself, a self-affection without which no person or ego would ever live” (IT, 210/[263]). Now it is one thing to say that without absolute life no relative life would live, but it is quite another to say that the two share the same life, and to do so is to forego any real sense of paradox. If there is only the one ultimate metaphysical situation, that of the accomplishment of the essence of absolute life in every living, even that of the poor and suffering (IT, 205/[257]), then there is nothing paradoxical at all about the conclusion that it is they who are blessed. At most, this insight is surprising, given that it contravenes our usual expectations. But being surprising seems all by itself to be enough to qualify as paradoxical according to Henry.

As he himself says, Christianity’s “radical overturning of the criterion of any truth is a paradox because it completely upsets ways of thinking about humanity, whether of today or of ancient times” (IT, 198/[248]). Recall also that he said his conception of man as Son of God and not a Being of the world was paradoxical for the same reason, that it upset all prior notions of the human person. Upsetting all prior conceptions seems to qualify a way of thinking for being revolutionary, but one wonders whether it is sufficient to qualify a way of thinking as paradoxical in any robust sense. Furthermore, to call a paradox that which overturns all prior ways of thinking implies that some way of thinking could in principle be adequate to the task of coming to terms with what heretofore only seemed paradoxical; that is once again, that the paradox is only apparent and could be dissolved with the right conceptuality.

What all this suggests to me is that far from there being a legitimate truth of the world in tension with the truth of life, there is in fact only the truth of life, and therefore the truth of the world, which does not correspond to reality, the one and only reality of life, is a trap, or as Henry says in this chapter it is “counterfeit” (IT, 197/[247]), “flimsy and empty” (IT, 197/[247]), and a “simple appearance” (IT, 196/[247]). Remember at the beginning of the book Henry made the much more modest claim that the truth of the world was true in a “secondary sense” when contrasted with the truth of life that founds it. His language here and in most other places in the later writings is much stronger, condemning the truth of the world as vacuous and insignificant. This is so much that case that even Henry’s own definition of paradox—“Paradox holds together two truths that exclude each other, such that, although each is possible if considered in isolation, the fact of asserting them at the same time about the same reality seems inadmissible” (IT, 196/[248])—does not apply to the central tenets of his philosophy of Christianity.

I said I was asking these questions in the spirit of Kierkegaard, so it is to him that I now turn. The thematic similarities between Henry and Kierkegaard are numerous. They share a concern with truth that is not reducible to mere empirical fact but salvific; they share a conception of the self as passively received from a constituting power; they stress affectivity and receptivity; they are both appreciative of the limits of thought and identify the absolute with God. Kierkegaard, like Henry, believes that appearance, and he will in fact use the word “phenomena” in passages from his journals that touch on this theme, is not up to the task of expressing the absolute. We read from a journal entry made in 1854 that “It is impossible for God to be identified directly” (JP, 3099/[XI.2 A 51]),[16] a fundamental tenet that echoes throughout the authorship as a whole. “The law for God’s nearness and remoteness is as follows: The more the phenomenon, the appearance, expresses that here God cannot possibly be present, the closer he is; inversely, the more the phenomenon, the appearance, expresses that God is very near, the farther away he is” (JP, 3099/[XI.2 A 51]).

This law of inverse relation as it were seems quite close in spirit to Henry’s theory of two truths. Yet Kierkegaard says elsewhere that the law of inverse relation, the more appearance the less God is present, is a paradoxical one too, and this will occasion a first point of contrast between Henry and himself. “As spirit God relates paradoxically to appearance (phenomenon), but paradoxically he can also come so close to actuality that he stands right in the middle of it, right on the street in Jerusalem;” (JP, 3099/[XI.2 A 51]) or again he will write “Consequently God can relate to appearance only in a paradoxical way, but God can also come so close that he can stand right in the middle of actuality, right in front of our noses” (JP, 3099/[XI.2 A 51]). So let’s be as attentive as we can to what exactly is the paradox at stake here. Is it that God cannot appear, or is this in fact not at all surprising given the limits of phenomenal appearance? Isn’t the paradox precisely that God is on the street in Jerusalem despite the fact that he cannot appear there? Indeed, the very fact that the god is in Jerusalem as opposed to anywhere (or everywhere) else means that the particularities of the god’s appearance are not irrelevant, that we are not dealing with a cosmic Christ who dwells only in invisible immanence but instead that “…in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died” (PF, 104).

We get an indication I think as to what it would mean to affirm such a paradox from the “Preamble from the Heart” in Fear and Trembling wherein Kierkegaard refers to the same verse of Scripture that Henry did above with respect to the indifference of self-showing to what is shown.[17] We read at the very beginning of the “Preamble from the Heart: “From the external and visible world there comes an old adage: ‘Only one who works gets bread.’ Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works. In the external world…everything…is subject to the law of indifference” (FT, 27). What we have here I would suggest is a paradoxical proverb, that while it is at home in the external world, which Kierkegaard I think describes here in terms very similar to those that Henry applies to his description of the world of phenomena, does not actually apply to it.

So already I think we can see that to be a paradox for Kierkegaard is to somehow belong to the world and yet not belong to it at the same time. That “only one who works gets bread” is a piece of wisdom that is heard in the world, but actually describes another world. To continue from the preamble: “It is different in the world of spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac” (FT, 27). Kierkegaard is presenting us with two contrasting realms governed by two contrasting orders. The second seems to map conveniently onto Henry’s account of the truth of life, where the poor really are blessed. The question is whether these two worlds relate to each other in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology in the same way they do in Henry’s, that is, by exclusion of the former by the latter. And there I think we have to answer in the negative.

At the end of the passage just cited Kierkegaard already anticipates the touchstone of this work, the story of Abraham, the meaning of which is that it is only Abraham who resigns his son, who draws the knife in faith, that gets his son back. I submit that what Kierkegaard wants us to see in Fear and Trembling is that the great and terrible paradox of Abraham’s deed is that while he dwells in the world of spirit by faith, this means exactly that he cannot thereby simply and only exclude the external world, where killing your son is a murder that rightly invites the scorn of all horrified witnesses and ultimately itself deserves the penalty of death. For Abraham to embody a paradox, the world he leaves behind must nevertheless be fully in effect, as Kierkegaard repeatedly reminds us. Abraham does not cancel the ethical; he suspends it. Even more important, he transforms it, as we see in what I think might be the most important passage in the entire book, “…it does not follow that the ethical should be invalidated; rather, the ethical receives a completely different expression, such as, for example, that love to God may bring the knight of faith to give his love to the neighbor—an expression opposite to that which, ethically speaking, is duty” (FT, 70).

Abraham by faith suspends not a realm of false and illusory truth but a perfectly legitimate possibility, even if legitimate only within circumscribed bounds, that the ethical consists only of universal duty to which he is always susceptible to being tempted. To diminish this possibility by condemning to nullity the external world would for Kierkegaard remove the teeth from the paradox entirely. For Kierkegaard we must acknowledge that it is true, many who work go hungry, and if they are blessed as a result this is because God does not just exclude their hunger but in excluding it takes it up again into himself.

This structure is everywhere in evidence in Kierkegaard’s work. As Ronald Hall has perceptively observed, a paradoxical relation “is a peculiar kind of dialectical relation in which a positive reality is taken to include within itself what it, by its very nature, excludes…despair, for example, is a structural element within faith even though faith excludes it; spirit includes sensuality within itself by virtue of excluding it; the possibility of being a self both includes and excludes the possibility of not being a self” and so on.[18] The Kierkegaardian paradox is paradox precisely because it includes within itself the “annulled possibility” as he says in The Sickness unto Death. This explains why the chapter in Philosophical Fragments on the absolute paradox is followed immediately by the appendix on offense, because the latter is an annulled possibility that always remains and must remain within faith for faith to be faith. To quote from Kierkegaard “In the life of the spirit everything is dialectical. Indeed, offense as annulled possibility is an element in faith, but offense directed away from faith is sin.”[19] The peculiar kind of truth expressed by the paradoxical relation is precisely one then in which earthly, external truth is not merely excluded, but simultaneously excluded and preserved, with the final effect that the antitheses are not resolved in a higher synthesis but that the crushing difference between two possibilities, like those of faith and offense, is only intensified.

We can now return to the issue of phenomena and the absolute. According to Kierkegaard where there is more appearance there is less of God and vice versa. If this relation is paradoxical as he says it is, then it is so because in it God’s appearance does not just exclude intramundane phenomena but includes it also by transformation and suspension. What this in turn implies however is that there is a phenomenon or class of phenomena that paradoxically does in fact disclose the absolute within the world. Consider this quote from the journal: “The more the phenomenon, the appearance, expresses that here God cannot possibly be present, the closer he is. This is the case with Christ. The very moment the appearance expressed that this man could not possibly be the God-man…then God was the closest to actuality he had ever been” (JP, 3099/[XI.2 A 51]). This passage struggles with the same aporia that Henry resolved by excluding both Christ and man from the world. Here Kierkegaard though interprets the phenomenality of Christ as varying in accord with the expectations of those who encounter him to make God more or less manifest through Christ. So Christ cannot be on this understanding utterly foreign to the world, or at least cannot travel through it without being recognized. I suspect this argument of Kierkegaard’s is not often noticed because he himself gestures toward this interpretation infrequently but with decisive consequence.

For example, in Philosophical Fragments, amid all the many emphatic declarations by Kierkegaard that the god is completely unknown he confesses at least once that the god’s purpose “cannot be to walk through the world in such a way that not one single person would come to know it. Presumably he will allow something about himself to be understood…” (PF, 56).[20] Now this is very strange because again Kierkegaard insists throughout that the god appears in the world incognito, but there is at least one identifiable feature of the god that he nevertheless returns to again and again, including immediately prior to the passage just read, and that is that the god appears as a servant. Kierkegaard even cut from the Fragments a passage in which Kierkegaard admits that he could have expended more energy describing this aspect of the god’s appearance in the world. The expurgated paragraph is worth reading in full:

In the foregoing we have poetized the god as teacher and savior. Thus he did indeed become an individual human being. But his purpose was certainly not to mock men by revealing himself and then dying in such a way that no human being ever came to know his revelation. Every clue of the understanding was in itself no clue, and therefore it would have been no clue at all if he had gone triumphantly through the world and dominated all kingdoms and countries. Therefore in our poem something offensive was included: he was not entirely like other human beings; in little things he was different. This we could easily have developed further if we had extended the poem. He did not labor; in this way he did not concern himself with human affairs. And there was yet another difference: he suffered (JP, 3081/[V B 5]).

Is it possible that for Kierkegaard the paradoxical element of the appearance of God is not that Christ cannot appear in the world as Christ, as Henry argues, but that despite the incapacity of the world to manifest the absolute, Christ nevertheless does appear as a privileged phenomenon, such that while for Henry any and every phenomenon could be a clue to life, for Kierkegaard there is a recognizable phenomenon that provides a clue to the appearance of the absolute, namely the servant nature. Kierkegaard here characterizes a clue of the understanding as no clue. There is an analogue in this claim to Henry inasmuch as I think here Kierkegaard is repeating his claim that the understanding on its own cannot gain a foothold in comprehending the god, much as Henry would say that thought is of no use in penetrating the mystery of life. But it would be no clue at all Kierkegaard says if the god had appeared in the majesty of full phenomenality. A clue, to be a clue, must be a phenomenon that could always be interpreted differently than what it is, but it cannot bear no relationship at all to what it is a clue of.[21]

Hence the offensive particulars that characterize the god’s appearance in the world that Kierkegaard says he could have described more fully in the Fragments: the god is a servant. The god does not concern himself with human affairs. Ultimately and perhaps most important, the god suffers. These particulars Kierkegaard calls offensive specifically because they mark the god out not as exactly like other men and thereby wholly indistinguishable from them but as being importantly different and possibly unrecognizable precisely in this difference.[22] Earlier I argued that Henry cannot in principle rule in or out any phenomenon as indicative of the invisible phenomenality of life. For Kierkegaard, however, there are some privileged phenomena; these do not allow me to know with certainty the absolute itself, but they are negative indicators I think, inasmuch as they allow me construe within the world a possibility that comes from outside the world. For Henry such clues are neither necessary nor sufficient for the expression of the absolute, while for Kierkegaard I would argue they are not sufficient but indeed necessary.

Further corroboration for my interpretation can be found in key passages from the Journals as well, where Kierkegaard writes for instance in 1843, the same year he was working on the Fragments that “Christ’s appearance contains a polemic against existence. He became a human being like all others, but he stood in a polemical relationship to the concrete-ethical elements of actuality. He went about and taught the people; he owned nothing; he did not even have a place to lay his head” (JP, 3076/[IV A 62]) and from the same year “The divine paradox is that he became noticed, if in no other way than by being crucified, that he performed miracles and the like, which means that he still was recognizable by his divine authority, even though it demanded faith to solve its paradox” (3077/[IV A 103]).

Two considerations demonstrate that the fact that the god became noticed still does not take away from his status as incognito. The first is that in point of fact the god’s being noticed and simultaneously unknown are assertions that have to be kept together in order to secure the paradoxical status of the God-man’s appearance in the world. As Kierkegaard writes in the Fragments, “The god, however, cannot be envisioned, and that was the very reason he was in the form of a servant” (FT, 63). So far from it being the case that the god in letting something of himself be known or taking on the recognizable form of a servant, compromises his invisibility, the servant form, the life of suffering, the ethical repudiation of all worldly concerns, are clues not by making the invisible visible to the understanding but clues that negatively point the way to the paradox, for in all paradox “the positive is recognizable only by the negative” (JP, 6918/[XI.2 A 21]).

Kierkegaard is therefore not embroiled in a blameworthy contradiction by arguing that the god is unknown but also recognized; all he needs to show is that “for the follower the external form…is not inconsequential. It is what the follower has seen and touched with his hands, but the form is not of such importance that he would cease to be a believer if he happened one day to see the teacher on the street and did not immediately recognize him or even walked beside him for a while without becoming aware that it was he” (PF, 65).[23] This means that there is something permanently problematic about the paradoxical appearance of the god; it is not merely the case that all existing paradigms of understanding such a thing are inadequate but that no conceivable paradigm could or would be adequate to understanding the god’s appearance.[24]

The second consideration is that as I just read, while the god is recognizable by his divine authority the paradox is still graspable only by faith, which is itself a paradox for Kierkegaard. Despite the fact that the god is recognizable faith is still required for his recognition. As the Scripture makes clear to us in its telling of the incident on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 to which Kierkegaard has just referred, it is Christ who prevents his disciples from recognizing him and who acts as if he is going on to the next town. Only when urged to stay does he break bread with them in a eucharistic repetition of his suffering and death. At the moment of recognition of course his phenomenal appearance is instantly ended, and the disciples are left to ponder the reminiscence that their hearts burned within them as he had spoken, telling of his own life and works as they were foretold in the law and prophets. So once more it would seem that faith is not unrelated to a phenomenal appearance, the servant form, suffering and death, and the words of Scripture, but by themselves these appearances are indeed inadequate.[25] For as Kierkegaard says, “…to see this external form was something appalling: to associate with him as one of us and at every moment when faith was not present to see only the servant form” (PF, 65). The possibility that the would-be believer would see only a man like any other must always be acknowledged and preserved. Yet one cannot become a disciple without beholding something of the servant form, which serves as an occasion for faith.[26]

This is a final worthy point of contrast with Henry, for whom the paradox of two truths is typified in hypocrisy, not faith. Hypocrisy for Henry is the vain attempt to dwell in two different truths when only one truth matters. Faith for Kierkegaard must live in the external world, the world where those who work don’t get bread, where those with anxiety don’t have rest, where Abraham raises the knife in despair. Paradoxically though faith lives as if this world is not the only one, transforming it in the name of the realm of spirit that it cannot grasp. Faith for Kierkegaard cannot be merely a matter of dwelling within the immanence of a life that does not make contact with the world. And while the absolute excludes the world as we have seen in Kierkegaard’s account it does not stop there but affirms the world anew.[27] And just as there must be a scrap of appearance in the world by which I might know, if only negatively, the god, then analogously there is a negative role the learner plays in coming to faith, by “letting go” and thereby affirming the paradox in the all-important gesture of the leap. “Yet this letting go,” as he says in Philosophical Fragments, “even that is surely something; it is, after all, meine Zuthat. Does it not have to be taken into account, this diminutive moment, however brief it is—it does not have to be long, because it is a leap” (PF, 43).[28]

According to Kierkegaard this is the answer to how the truth can be learned. The god must make his appearance in the world and impart the condition of faith to the learner. For Henry the god and the learner are both outside the world from beginning to end. So I suppose the most succinct way for me to phrase what I am saying by way of conclusion is that I think Kierkegaard gives us an account of how both God in Christ and I as a faithful believer are not of the world and yet are nevertheless in the world, whereas it seems to me that for Henry God and man are definitely not of the world, but neither are they in it.[29]