being “incognito”

The individual does not stop being a human being, take off finitude’s motley in order to be dressed in the abstract garb of the monastery; but nor does he mediate between the absolute τέλος and finitude. In immediacy the individual is rooted in the finite; when resignation has convinced itself that he has acquired the absolute orientation towards the absolute τέλος, all is changed, the roots severed. He still lives in the finite, but he does not have his life in it. His life, just like anyone else’s, has the diverse predicates of a human existence, but he inhabits them as one who goes around in clothes borrowed from a stranger. He is a stranger in the world of the finite, but does not define his difference from worldliness by an alien mode of dress (a contradiction, since it would define him as worldly); he is incognito, but his incognito consists precisely in looking just like everyone else.

Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), 344-345