The Art of Taking Away

September 2026

Kierkegaard describes a form of communication that leaves its recipient, for a time, knowing less.

He is concerned with people for whom Christianity has become entirely familiar. They possess its explanations so securely that its meaning scarcely touches them. Further instruction can increase their knowledge without changing this relation at all.

The difficulty lies in how the knowledge is possessed.

His method is to return something familiar in a form that makes it strange. The recipient can no longer dispose of it with an immediate recognition. Something they knew has become something they must understand.

Kierkegaard compares this to knowing a mathematical demonstration when its letters appear as ABC, but losing the ability to follow it when they appear as ACB. The changed arrangement exposes a dependence on the familiar presentation. What seemed to be understanding belonged partly to the arrangement.

Form therefore reaches into knowledge itself. Change the form, and you can discover how little of what you possess is available beyond the conditions in which you acquired it.

This gives communication a peculiar task: to interrupt possession without simply replacing it with another explanation. The recipient must recover the meaning through their own activity. No additional statement can perform that activity for them.

Self-knowledge is vulnerable to the same confusion. An account of ourselves can become available so automatically that we mistake our ability to repeat it for an ability to think through it. Its fluency protects it from becoming a question.

A philosophical encounter can disturb that fluency. Our own words return in an unfamiliar relation, and the explanation no longer settles what it once settled.

The resulting difficulty is not yet insight. But something has become possible that familiarity prevented: we have to think about what we thought we knew.

What returns may be the same knowledge.

It is no longer held in the same way.