- Length
- 656 pagesHong and Hong, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Princeton, 1992
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
A very long postscript to a very short book, arguing that the questions that matter most cannot be settled by the methods that settle everything else. Kierkegaard was almost unknown outside Denmark when he died at forty-two, and became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
- Date
- 1846
- Author
- Søren Kierkegaard, as Johannes Climacus
- Region
- Copenhagen
- Language
- Danish
- 1941 English, Swenson and Lowrie The version that carried him into English Attested
- 1992 English, Howard and Edna Hong Princeton; the scholarly standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 39 years
Almost unread outside Denmark for sixty years, translated into German after 1900 and into English from the 1930s, and by the middle of the twentieth century a founding text of existentialism.
What the book says
A book of six hundred pages appended to one of eighty, by an author who says he is not a Christian and is trying to work out how a person could become one. The problem it sets is deliberately awkward. Christianity is presented in the culture as a body of doctrine that can be assessed like any other - historically, philosophically, by scholarship - and Kierkegaard's narrator argues that this misses what it is for. Objective enquiry into a historical claim can never yield more than approximation, and approximation is precisely what an eternal happiness cannot be staked on; so the more scholarly the enquiry becomes, the further it moves from the decision it was supposed to inform. From this comes the book's most quoted and most misread claim, that truth is subjectivity - not that any belief is as good as another, but that for this kind of question what matters is the relation in which a person stands to what they believe, and that a person passionately committed to something uncertain is closer to faith than one who assents correctly without caring. Around this runs a sustained attack on the system, on the notion of a world-historical standpoint, and on being a Christian by being born in Denmark.
What it argues
That there is a class of question for which objective enquiry is not merely insufficient but positively misdirected. On matters of fact, more evidence is better and suspension of judgement is reasonable until it arrives; but a person deciding how to live cannot wait for the scholarship to conclude, and the decision is not made better by being made more tentatively. What Kierkegaard calls subjectivity is the how rather than the what of belief - the passion, commitment and risk with which a person holds it - and his claim is that for existential questions this is where truth lies. He is careful to distinguish this from thinking that believing makes things so. The objective uncertainty remains; what changes is that the uncertainty is the condition of faith rather than an obstacle to it.
What it answered
Hegel, the Danish Hegelians, and the established church that had made being Christian a matter of civic membership. The attack on the system and the attack on Christendom are the same attack: both substitute a general framework for a particular person's decision, and both let someone hold the correct position without it costing them anything. He is also answering the age's confidence in world history as a court of judgement, which he regards as a way of avoiding the only judgement that concerns anyone.
How it argues
Through a pseudonym, indirectly, and at deliberate length. The narrator is a humorist who declares himself an outsider to Christianity, which lets Kierkegaard argue about faith without occupying the position of someone recommending it - a technique he calls indirect communication and defends on the ground that a truth of this kind cannot be handed over, only made available for someone to appropriate. The prose is digressive, funny, self-interrupting and enormously long, and the length is itself part of the joke: a postscript six times the size of its book, written against systematic completeness.
The moment
Copenhagen in the 1840s, a small city where Kierkegaard was a conspicuous figure with a private income, a broken engagement he never stopped writing about, and a running feud with a satirical paper that caricatured him in the streets. He intended the Postscript to be his last book and to take a country parish afterwards; he wrote for another nine years instead, ending with a violent public attack on the Danish church, and died in 1855 aged forty-two.
How it travelled
By translation, half a century late. Kierkegaard wrote in Danish for a readership of a few thousand and was effectively unknown abroad; German translations from around 1900 reached Jaspers and Heidegger, and the French existentialists took him up from there. The English versions of the 1930s and 40s completed the process. The result is a curious reception: a writer whose central concern was Christian faith became a founding figure for a movement most of whose members were atheists, and who used his analysis of anxiety, choice and inauthenticity without the destination he wrote it for.
The strongest objection
That the position cannot distinguish faith from fanaticism. If what matters is the passion with which a belief is held rather than its content or its evidence, then someone passionately committed to something monstrous meets the criterion, and Kierkegaard's own examples do not rule the case out. He would answer that the analysis applies only where objective certainty is unavailable in principle and that the object of faith is not arbitrary; but the argument as stated makes the how decisive, and every attempt by his defenders to smuggle a constraint back into the what weakens the original claim. The related complaint, made from the Hegelian side, is that a philosophy of the isolated individual has no way of criticising the society that formed him.
Why read it
Not entire - very few do. The sections on becoming subjective and on the impossibility of a system of existence contain the argument, and the passages on the Danish Hegelians are the funniest philosophical writing of the century. Read Philosophical Fragments first, since this is its postscript, and take a good modern translation.
- First printed
- 1846
- First in English
- 1941
- Digitised
- Partial
One of a sequence of pseudonymous works, each with a different putative author holding a different position; Kierkegaard insisted the pseudonyms were characters rather than masks and asked to be quoted only as their editor.
Swenson and Lowrie's 1941 English opened the field. The Hong and Hong edition of 1992 is the scholarly standard; both are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live, in philosophy of religion, in existentialist thought, and increasingly in work on the ethics of belief and on what it is to hold a commitment under uncertainty. He is also read as a literary writer of the first rank, which is unusual for anyone in this section.
On quoting this book
The Danish is public domain but every English translation is modern and in copyright, and the famous formulations depend heavily on the translator's choices. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How to read the pseudonyms is the standing methodological question, since Kierkegaard explicitly asked not to be identified with them and readers routinely ignore this. Whether truth is subjectivity is an epistemological claim, a claim about a special class of questions, or a rhetorical provocation is disputed. Whether his late attack on the Danish church is the consistent conclusion of the earlier work or a change of register is argued. And the existentialist reception, which detached the analysis from the Christianity it was written for, is now often treated as a misappropriation rather than an extension.