Public

In the context of McCormick's reconstruction of Kierkegaard's critique, "the Public" designates a structurally vacuous form of collective address — a pseudo-universality generated by the rhetorical practices of Christendom's "preacher-prattle" (Præstesnak). The Public is not a concrete assembly of subjects but a numerical abstraction: it is produced by the very probabilistic rhetoric that counts converts, centuries, and clerics, and mistakes aggregate quantity for qualitative truth (sandhed). The Public is, in other words, the referent that probabilistic signification conjures into apparent existence — the ideological formation that results when the paradox of Christianity is dissolved into a hypothesis susceptible to empirical corroboration. As a sorites fallacy made social, the Public is the name for what remains when eternal truth is replaced by statistical plausibility.

What distinguishes "Xndom" (Christendom) from the Public, in Kierkegaard's logic as McCormick reconstructs it, is not a difference in kind but a difference in danger. Both are formations sustained by prattle — by a mode of talk that circulates without genuine subjective commitment, substituting the warmth of collective consensus for the cold singularity of faith. The Public, however, is at least visibly secular; Christendom dresses the same paralogism in the authority of the sacred, making its pseudo-universality far more insidious. The concept of "the Public" thus functions as a foil that clarifies the specific pathology of religious collective speech: it is Christendom's more dangerous double, sharing the same logical structure of empty signification but adding to it the consecrated weight of institutional religion.

This concept appears in McCormick's source (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, p.116) as a comparative foil within an argument about Kierkegaard's critique of Preacher-Prattle. The Public's role is clarificatory: it is the secular baseline against which Christendom's more dangerous pseudo-universality is measured. In this sense, "the Public" is a specification rather than a primary concept — it anchors the argument by making visible the shared logical structure (sorites fallacy, probabilistic rhetoric, dissolution of paradox) that Kierkegaard attributes both to modern secular discourse and to official Christianity.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, the Public can be read as the social formation that probabilistic Signification produces when it fails as a quilting operation. Where Lacan's account of Signification describes the permanent risk of sliding meaning — chains of signifiers that never fully terminate in a stable signified — Kierkegaard's Public names the pseudo-stable collective identity that prattle does produce, but only by betraying truth (sandhed) and replacing it with sandsynlighed (probability). The Public is thus what a failed or corrupt quilting-point generates at the level of community: not a genuine universality grounded in the paradox of Christianity (an analogue to the Real that exceeds symbolic capture), but a counterfeit universality sustained entirely within a self-referential network of mutually reinforcing significations — prattle talking to prattle. The concept therefore sits at the intersection of Signification, Sorites Fallacy, and Universality, exposing the ideological effects of a discourse that mistakes numerical accumulation for eternal validity.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.116)

the religious community sustained by their prattle differs from the public in only one regard: 'Xndom' is a much more dangerous concept than 'the public.'

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs a structural equivalence — "differs in only one regard" — that collapses the apparent opposition between sacred community and secular public into a shared logical form (prattle sustaining pseudo-universality), while the term "dangerous" signals that the difference is not ontological but rhetorical potency: Christendom's appropriation of the sacred amplifies the same paralogism the Public embodies, making its dissolution of truth all the more corrosive.