Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume 1

by Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong (Translator), Edna H. Hong (Translator)

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Classics, Psychology

650 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 1846

About the author

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Church of Denmark. Much of his work deals with religious themes such as faith in God, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. His early work was written under various pseudonyms who present their own distinctive viewpoints in a complex dialogue.

Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.

Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.

Reviews

[John Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many ways, this book is necessary while also being provocative. Whether you are Christian or not, though particularly if you are, this book could very well be necessary. As S.K. often said, basically, “In this day and age… this book is necessary.” The same could be said for today. As many Christians decry post-Christendom and the decline of church membership and the perceived erosion of Christian values, many people’s strategy is to do anything they can to increase membership in the church. Does that mean those people are Christian? Another strategy is to influence as many people as possible to reject homosexual persons’ rights or fight abortion. Do those things make one a Christian? S.K.’s answer would certainly be no.

Essentially, S.K. asks the question, “What makes a Christian?” Indeed, what is this life all about? The answer lies in existence. To acknowledge that we are existing, first of all, which in itself is a paradox, and to accept that paradox rather than try to explain it. Beyond that, to accept that we are existing before and with God; to live our own existence with fear and trembling before God. Christianity, and life, is not about being “an assistant professor” and explaining the paradox that God could want to be in relationship with us, that god could become human, that we live generally; rather, it is about existing subjectively. There’s little else other than our subjective existence that we can know. That’s not to say that God is determined by our subjective theologies or ideas or experiences, but is to say that we only know God subjectively in existence.

What does this mean for us? It means that existence and especially Christianity, or really any religion, are much more difficult than we make it out to be. Throughout Christendom (what S.K. railed against) people took it for granted that they were Christians because they went to church. Now churches are trying to make it easy to be a Christian in order to restore Christendom (“it’s simple, just believe such and such,” or “just be a good person”). But being accountable for God for one’s inward existence before God, in the paradox, is a greater challenge. Is your very existence lived in inwardness with God? Or are you trying to make sense of things, trying to achieve something in life, imposing your will or ideas on others, seeking love or success?

This is a necessary and provocative challenge. It’s not easy to read through this whole work. If you want a shorter and slightly easier read you can check out S.K.’s Philosophical Fragments. But there’s a reason why the Hongs (the editors) chose this to be the first volume in their set of translated S.K. works. Here S.K. defines, essentially, his life work. All his other writings point to or at what he here details. Read it, wrestle with it, and live inwardly as an existing person.

[Asha Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the core of my being I love only a handful of things: God, my mother, Bach, and Soren Kierkegaard.

This book changed my life.

[Lynn Silsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most philosophers are bad writers. Excellent thinkers but really a drudge to get through. Kierkegaard's a beautiful writer. Moving. A large part of why I put the "reluctant" in the little label I apply to myself - "reluctant atheist."

Kierkegaard is my favorite philsopher and Postscript is my favorite of his works.

[Claude Bragg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the funniest philosopher, bashes Hegel a lot and is a dawg in basically founding existentialism. Extremely tough to swallow at times but worth the effort. A very chewy steak but super flavorful so you can’t be mad would be a good analogy

[David Calhoun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I'm not sure any review can give this tome what it deserves, but I'll at least start. Hopefully I come back later to flesh out this review better.

This really is the capstone of K's "first authorship" which summarizes a lot of what he's trying to do in his other works. Despite that, it is exceptionally dense and I think even harder to get through than usual (K is always so prolix), so I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to K's thought.

It should first be said that K distanced himself from all of his pseudonymous authors in order to communicate indirectly, in the style of Socrates, who claimed ignorance and yet provoked thought and discussion through dialog. K explains his intentions and distancing directly in the appendix of the book. For convenience I’ll refer to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript’s (C.U.P.) author as Kierkegaard, though K again distanced himself and used the pseudonymous name Johannes Climacus as the author of this particular work. As a side note, this is also the name of a 5th-6th century Christian mystic who wrote “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”, which may have connections to Wittgenstein’s Ladder analogy (Wittgenstein himself was an admiring reader of the Postscript).

K’s way of characterizing his concerns is always through contrasting dichotomies. Already we have seen direct and indirect communication to contrast the styles of authorship.

The big dichotomy of the C.U.P. is objective truth versus subjective truth, which should be the main point any reader should come away with if nothing else. “Subjectivity is truth” is one of the things K is famous for saying. And unfortunately this has often been mischaracterized as saying something like “objective truth does not exist”. The point isn’t that there is no objective truth for K. There is, but only God has full access to it.

For everyone else, the only thing we can really call “objective truth” is at best an approximation of objective truth: system-building (always with Hegel as the characteristic example) can only take us so far in the direction of objective truth. Our own day isn’t much filled with these philosophical “system-builders”, but rather scientific attempts at objective explanations about how the world works. These modern scientists would be the target of K’s attacks today. The problem is that these sorts of philosophers and scientists, in seeking an objective truth, attempt to remove the biased subjective observer and abstract away into a higher “objective” realm, where individual persons become irrelevant. The subjective individual is abstracted away into nothingness and has no place in the objective explanation. But for whose sake are they building the system in the first place, if not individuals? (side note: Heidegger was very much influenced by Kierkegaard, and I’m reminded of Heidegger’s idea of the self [Dasein] being presupposed as a given - the subjective perspective is where all his philosophy begins from).

K’s insistence is that “subjective truth”, a truth appropriated and resonating in an individual is most important, and should be the focus of our lives. Particularly, the individual’s subjective relationship with God.

C.U.P. is incredibly focused on subjective truth and the individual’s relationship with God, so hyper-focused on the first of the two “greatest commandments”, that really there is no talk of the second (“love your neighbor as yourself”), and to K’s defense, I suppose that could instead be found in other pseudonymous works.

K’s hyper-focus and intensity against the “system-builders” of his day, along with all worldly wisdom, makes it seem that he is against anything that isn’t subjective truth. I really think that’s a misinterpretation. K’s concern is that all of this worldly concern and attempts at objective truth will distract from what is truly important, which is subjective truth and the individual’s relationship with God. That people will become respected teachers, historians, presidents of the local birding club, become rich, etc, but will in just that way lose their focus on what is truly important in life.

But let’s assume we’ve re-oriented our lives towards subjective truth in the way K wants us to, having made the crucial decision whether to accept or reject Christ. We now have our priorities straight, and we can live our practical lives keeping everything in perspective. Then I think K would say it’s fine to try to get closer to objective truth by studying, continually learning from the world, perhaps becoming prudent businesspersons. As long as all these things don’t become our focus, and we approach them in a sort of second-class understanding, always grounded in our first-class subjective understanding.

And as long as we don’t try to learn about subjective truth via objective truth, which is impossible!

And the scholar mixing with Christianity actually gets in the way. Because the scholar can never get at 100% objective truth, all life can be spent deliberating over possibilities of how to live one’s life, perhaps getting a bit closer to the objective truth by the end of life. Until at last they find that they have no life left to live, and it turns out that the most important decision was never made, because they were distracted - and obsessed with getting 100% objective truth before making a decision. For K this is a tragedy, because the whole point of life is that the decision - whether to accept or reject Christ - is central. For K, even those who reject Christ are getting it right in a sense, because at least they have been decisive and acted.

For K, Christianity is utter paradox, against all reasonable attempts at explanation (explained by Paul himself: Christianity is foolishness to Gentiles and an offense to Jews). Christianity is not about bragging about memorized Bible verses, about wearing fancy robes, about being showy, but about an inner life which is secret from the outer world. It is about the “how” questions, not the “what” questions.

In the end, accumulated knowledge is actually a stumbling block, and the unlearned person is actually better off in this sense. Just as the rich person is actually in a worse situation than a poor person in relation to Christianity, because the accumulation is their focus in life, and it has become a distraction. In K’s day as in now, the accumulation of knowledge is the focus of many - the “what” content. But that accumulation delays action - the “how” content.

Much of what K had to say is still incredibly relevant in this world today. But I have to say that some parts haven’t aged well, simply because of circumstances. In K’s time all citizens (of Denmark) considered themselves a Christian, and to K this in itself was a stumbling block (Christendom vs real Christianity). Most people thought it was just a matter of course - something you became when you were baptized as an infant, and that’s that. For K, Christianity is not a matter of course. It is rather extremely difficult, and a decision towards it is something that cannot be seriously made by a child, and not something you simply become after being baptized, with all showiness and no inner reflection.

Though Jesus does call us to have a childlike faith, the decision to faith is not childlike. It is rather something that can only be made as an adult. An adult via their inner life, through the paradox, through decisive action, ever-present faith, without worldly understanding, and with continual suffering.

Other helpful dichotomies in the C.U.P, with more value put on the second term:
-outer vs inner world
-Christendom vs Christianity
-the “what” vs the “how”
-finite vs eternal
-reason vs paradox
-theory vs action
-analyzing possibilities vs decision
-childlike vs adult Christianity
-Sunday faith vs ever-present daily faith
-one-time faith decision vs ever-present faith
-outer showing of infant baptism vs inner, adult baptism
-humor vs irony
-comfort vs suffering
-easy vs difficult
-relationship with lover vs relationship with God
-a learned vs unlearned person
-focusing on whether a preacher is living their message (is a hypocrite) vs focusing on what’s important, the message and applying it to our own lives
-ease of understanding the Bible vs burden of living its teachings

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kierkegaard was the prophet of modern subjectivity, and this book is genius. But. Dude really could have used an editor. This is like listening to the smartest person you've ever met thinking out loud about Hegel and Christianity for 12 hours straight.

[Dan Yingst · Rating 5 out of 5]

um, terrific? difficult? maddening? worth it?

[Derek Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slows down around the sections on “pathos.” But the section on subjectivity and the final bit on the pseudonyms are fantastic.

[Oliver Barton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely something that requires a bit of extra material to really understand. But I found the discussion of religion as a primarily subjective matter to be incredibly interesting.

[jeremiah]

Reading Kierkegaard in the middle of the summer reminds me of my all-too-brief life in Minnesota: bug spray, windmills, late nights at The Contented Cow, and, of course, long, deep, and important conversations with friends. And the taste of french fries in milkshakes.

Despite its focus on the truth of subjectivity, one of the most striking things about this book is that it seems so cut off from other people and the world more generally. This marks a deep difference from SK's 1843 books, for instance, in which part of the pseudonyms' challenge was to get the reader into a position to question, with her own philosophical authority, the commitments she holds to others in, say, romantic love and marriage. In the Postscript, we're confronted and stuck with Climacus' few obsessions, and he rarely gestures towards other people. Climacus reminds me of Descartes' Meditator in this way. Perhaps Climacus would welcome this comparison, given the profoundly personal motivating question of the book: "How can I, Johannes Climacus, share in the happiness that Christianity promises?" After all, de Silentio, in the Preface to Fear and Trembling, praises Descartes for doing just what he said he'd do, that is, going on a spiritual journey for himself, one that others would be misguided to follow in exact detail. However, while the Meditator takes himself to have restored the foundation of his knowledge at the end of the sixth night of meditating, Climacus, the humble humorist who resigns to go no farther than the paradox of Christianity, does not discover how to be a Christian, revoking the entire book—not unlike Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, or so some commentators claim—and writing that the project was only for his own private enjoyment and so, unimportant to the broader intellectual world. So, perhaps it's a mistake to expect Climacus to speak to our relationships with others and to the world, like A, Judge Wilhelm, de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, and the Young Man all so artfully do. Nevertheless, Climacus—SK?—can't entirely help himself, however, and often compares romantic love to faith. Philosophers who take there to be 'reasons' for love, take note!

[Dustyn Hessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My advice to any prospective reader of Kierkegaard is: Do not read his work... not yet.

On the other hand, in this book, I deem it useful for any reader to go on ahead and indulge. Properly, Kierkegaard is a philosopher for everyman insofar as most of his work directs it's attention to the process of becoming, and not necessarily the intended "end," persay. In this way, he can appeal to any reader simply delighted in the complexity and movement of language, and not necessarily just the bones-and-grit madcore thinkaholic.

He touches on, as he usually does, The Age: "Every age has its own; the immortality of our age is perhaps not lust and pleasure and sensuality, but rather [...] debauched contempt for human beings." The uncanniness regarding this passage is the fact that it is still, at the very least, an evident problem with out current society: does it not hold true that, more often than not, one's sheer selfhood, although it may not bluster out it's mad truths and the-like, or have "affect" on our own egoish and cowboy endeavors (such as money, material excess, etc.), is scorned by us evermore because it quietly steers clear of voicing itself - for instance, the teacher who tells the delinquent to identify himself, although it is obviously the school, in it's rigid construction and systemizing formulas, that, more often than not, instills in the delinquent a sort loathing for popular academics (although he/she may be more skilled in reasoning and other whatnots regarding Actual Truth).

Kierkegaard covers so many relevant problems and provides so much glory for the mind that it is almost appalling that he has not gotten the recognition he rightfully deserves. But then again, isn't it precisely covered in Pessoa's quote that, "Men hate truth," that we find this sort of drift away from that which is spiritual (a high category of existence that Kierkegaard grounds his philosophy in so well and so lyrically) and cumulative momentum for that which is quite trivial and arbitrary (such as bourgeois politics, economic frivolity that results in "hidden" violence, etc., etc.).

Above everything else, I think it's fair that I say that, while I may not be Christian or even a Philosophy major for that matter, Kiekegaard's writings in this book are intensely enlightening. Who knows? Maybe its advantageous to read Kiekegaard from a semi-enlightened distance?

[Mark Ellis]

Perhaps the most difficult book I've read, but worth the struggle. Not for the faint of heart. Vols 1 & 2 together.
Anything by Kierkegaard provokes a frank, Christian self-examination. (I have many of his books)

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because only Kierkegaard could write postscript that's 500 pages longer than the actual book.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental. Incredible.

This book could have cured me if I’d read it in 1998. It’s still a wonderful read now. I did want to throw it across the room at times. SK does go on at times. But there’s incredible brilliance and insight here too, and if it’s focused on “how to be a Christian” it’s really much more universalizable than that — he’s a major existential thinker for a reason and the musing on “becoming subjective” and living your life as a work of art are beautiful hard challenges.

The book also completely dismantles the idolatrous heresy that is US White Evangelical Christianity, all before it came to be its current particularly demonic form, before it even really existed. But of course they won’t read it, and if they did they would mostly make sure not to understand it.

I wish I’d read it when my friend Brian first recommended it some 25 years ago. I’d love to be able to talk with him about it now.

[Dan Borkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent sequel to "Philosophical Fragments". Requires a lot of time, background information, and effort to understand and interpret, but like most of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, it is well-worth the time.

[Portal Prince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kierkegaard really threw everything but the kitchen sink into this one. I don't even know what to say about it except... Good God!

[Søren K. Dick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to be the 667th review for my guy, the individual himself. It would have him turning in heaven if he knew there were 666 ratings of any of his writings on earth in 2022

[Galib Kabir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love you my little schizo.

[Aaron]

wisdom unlimited bibliography

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding insight and very strong critiques on Hegel which come through reframing Hegel to emphasise his lack of interest in the existing individual.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I searched the web for commentary on this text as I read it and it seems as though many people believe this text to be merely a humorous mockery of modern philosophical inquiry and not much else. I completely disagree. It is humorous, after all Climacus confesses that he is a humorist, yet, I believe it is an important text in which Climacus not only opposes modern speculative thought but gives critcal insight into different subjectivities while approaching the "religious" subject (but never reaching or claiming himself).

[VALENTINE · Rating 3 out of 5]

søren is on some shit. the mix of nihilistic existentialism and theology is so cool. søren is an old testament baddie. he uses the word pagan a lot. I like to imagine what he would think of me. he would probably tell me that I lack faith and that he doesn't want to talk to me anymore. and I would say "thanks for your time". and he would leave, and no one would ever believe I talked to kierkegaard.

[Dean]

[David Tye · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of Kierkegaard's works and the book that has had the most impact philosophically on me. Finally broke me from slavery to the contemporary scientistic mindset.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great in spots, but too prolix for me.