Communicating Without Imparting: A Reappraisal of Kierkegaard’s Indirect Communication

In some unpublished lecture notes on communication, Kierkegaard introduces a distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ communication. According to these notes, the key distinguishing feature of indirect communication, with respect to its formal structure, is that it lacks an ‘object’. By this, Kierkegaard appears to envisage a form of communication in which what gets imparted is strictly nothing. However, this presents an immediate puzzle, especially given that our natural way of understanding communication just is as the transmission of some content from one person to another. How can we even possibly conceive of a communication that has no ‘object’, i.e., no communicative content? Regarding Kierkegaard on indirect communication, a standard general interpretative strategy rows back on the notion of a form of communication in which what is imparted is strictly nothing. Instead, critics appeal (more or less expressly) to the idea of communicative content that is imparted indirectly, i.e., implicitly or ambiguously. My overall aim in this thesis is threefold. Firstly, I aim to clarify the notion of communication that lacks an object. I show that, while it does not rely on the possibility of forms of communication that contain no intelligible content, this notion does rely on there being ways of communicating that are strictly non-didactic, i.e., not aimed at imparting any knowledge or information. Secondly, I show how variants of the standard interpretation misconstrue Kierkegaard’s strict direct/indirect distinction, as a distinction between explicit and implicit ways of imparting content. Thirdly, I offer an alternative. Specifically, I defend the following: that indirect communication’s purpose is to problematise the recipient’s relation to that which he takes himself to already know. I develop this alternative by re-examining Kierkegaard’s conception of ‘doubly-reflected’ mode of communication, the artistry he thinks this involves, and its role in his overall communicative strategy.