Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the
Philosophical Fragments (Danish: Afsluttende
uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske
Smuler) is a major work thought to be by Søren
Kierkegaard.
The work is a poignant attack against Hegelianism,
the philosophy of Hegel, especially Hegel's
Science of Logic.
The work is also famous for its dictum, Subjectivity
is Truth.
It was an attack on what Kierkegaard saw as
Hegel's deterministic philosophy.
Against Hegel's system, Kierkegaard is often
interpreted as taking the side of metaphysical
libertarianism or freewill, though it has
been argued that an incompatibilist conception
of free will is not essential to Kierkegaard's
formulation of existentialism.
As the title suggests, the Postscript is sequel
to the earlier Philosophical Fragments.
The title of the work is ironic because the
Postscript is almost five times larger than
the Fragments.
The Postscript credits "Johannes Climacus"
as the author and Kierkegaard as its editor.
Like his other pseudonymous works, the Postscript
is not a reflection of Kierkegaard's own beliefs.
However, unlike his other pseudonymous works,
Kierkegaard attaches his name as editor to
this work, showing the importance of the Postscript
to Kierkegaard's overall authorship.
== Contrasts in Concluding Unscientific Postscript
==
When I began as an author of Either/Or, I
no doubt had a far more profound impression
of the terror of Christianity than any clergyman
in the country.
I had a fear and trembling such as perhaps
no one else had.
Not that I therefore wanted to relinquish
Christianity.
No, I had another interpretation of it.
For one thing I had in fact learned very early
that there are men who seem to be selected
for suffering, and, for another thing, I was
conscious of having sinned much and therefore
supposed that Christianity had to appear to
me in the form of this terror.
But how cruel and false of you, I thought,
if you use it to terrify others, perhaps upset
every so many happy, loving lives that may
very well be truly Christian.
It was as alien as it could possibly be to
my nature to want to terrify others, and therefore
I both sadly and perhaps also a bit proudly
found my joy in comforting others and in being
gentleness itself to them-hiding the terror
in my own interior being.
So my idea was to give my contemporaries (whether
or not they themselves would want to understand)
a hint in humorous form (in order to achieve
a lighter tone) that a much greater pressure
was needed-but then no more; I aimed to keep
my heavy burden to myself, as my cross.
I have often taken exception to anyone who
was a sinner in the strictest sense and then
promptly got busy terrifying others.
Here is where Concluding Postscript comes
in.
Soren Kierkegaard, Journal and Papers, VI
6444 (Pap.
X1 A541) (1849) (Either/Or Part II, Hong,
p. 451-452)
== Reception ==
Eduard Geismar was an early lecturer on the
works of Soren Kierkegaard.
He gave lectures at Princeton Theological
Seminary in March 1936 and states this about
Johannes Climacus: Johannes Climacus has so
delineated the ethico-religious life that
Christianity becomes an intensification of
subjectivity and its pathos.
Through the discipline of resignation, aiming
at an absolute commitment to the highest good,
through the discipline of suffering, through
the consciousness of guilt, the way leads
step by step to a more profound pathos, until
by a leap we reach the absolute maximum of
subjectivity in the Christian consciousness
of sin, with its imperative need for a new
departure.
The Christian revelation is not a set of propositions,
but a creative act of the individual who has
been prepared to receive it in part by the
very discipline of human idealism, and who
through this creative act becomes a new creature.
But no birth is without birth-pangs and no
revelation is without an experience of suffering.
The way to Christianity goes through a decision,
a crucial decision in the temporal moment;
faith is an existential leap.
The necessity of this leap is what gives offense
to man and to all human idealism.
Eduard Geismar, Lectures on the Religious
Thought of Soren Kierkegaard, p. 57 Augsburg
Publishing House, Minneapolis 1937
Emil Brunner mentioned Kierkegaard 51 times
in his 1937 book Man in Revolt and wrote a
semi-serious parody of Kierkegaard's idea
of truth as subjectivity by making truth objectivity
in 1947.
The phrase Everything is relative is spoken
emphatically by the very people for whom the
atom or its elements are still the ultimate
reality.
Everything is relative, they say, but at the
same time they declare as indubitable truth
that the mind is nothing but a product of
cerebral processes.
This combination of gross objectivism and
bottomless subjectivism represents a synthesis
of logically irreconcilable, contradictory
principles of thought, which is equally unfortunate
from the point of view of philosophical consistency
and from that ethical and cultural value.
Apart from this last sceptical stage, it must
be said that modem spiritual evolution has
been taking unambiguously the line of a more
or less materialistic objectivism.
This chapter of human history could be headed
— to parody Kierkegaard's phrase — The
object is the truth!
It cannot, then, be a surprise to see man
more and more engulfed in the object, in things,
in material being, in economic life, in technics,
in a one-sided, quantitative manner of thinking,
and in quantitative standards of value.
In the sphere of material being the quantum
is the only differentiating factor.
Material being is merely quantitative being.
An objectivist understanding of truth expresses
itself, therefore, not merely in terms of
practical materialism, but also in a general
quantification of all life, as it may be seen
in the craving for records in sport, in pride
in the growth of cities of millions of inhabitants,
in respect for the multi-millionaire, in admiration
for great political power.
Reverence for the quantum is, so to speak,
the new version of the worship of the golden
calf.
It is an inevitable consequence of the objectivist
conception of truth: The object is the truth.
The question as to whether Kierkegaard was
an existentialist was brought up by Libuse
Lukas Miller.
She wrote the following in 1957: Kierkegaard,
who is falsely hailed as the father of modern
existentialism, used the existential “dialectic”
never as an end in itself but always as an
offensive and defensive weapon in a battle
on behalf of the Christian faith deliberately
planned to meet what he thought were the special
apologetic and evangelistic needs of his historical
situation, and, therefore, the Kierkegaardian
existentialism should be regarded rather as
the exception than the rule in existential
philosophizing.
And Kierkegaard himself should not be called
the father of modern existentialism.
The Christian and the World of Unbelief 1957
by Libuse Lukas Miller p. 78
In 1962 Jean T Wilde edited The Search For
Being and included an excerpt from Kierkegaard's
Concluding Postscript concerning Gotthold
Lessing.
Wilde says, "In the Concluding Postscript
the question of "the objective problem concerning
the truth of Christianity" is dealt with in
the first part.
Kierkegaard shows that neither historically
nor speculatively can we have objective knowledge
of Christianity's truth or of its untruth.
He says "a logical system is possible, but
an existential system is impossible."
In 1963 Kenneth Hamilton described Paul Tillich
as an individual who was as anti-Hegel as
Kierkegaard was.
He was referring to Kierkegaard's distrust
of system builders which he discussed in The
Concluding Unscientific Postscript (p. 13-15,
106-112.)
The first total opponent of Hegel's standpoint
was Soren Kierkegaard, father of modern existentialism.
Hegel had many critics in his lifetime, but
they were mostly those who attacked his system
because they believed that they could construct
a better one themselves.
But his Danish critic attacked him for being
the most consistent system-builder among system-builders.
In the name of Christian faith Kierkegaard
rejected not this or that element in Hegelianism
but the whole, referring to it in mockery
as c the System.
So it happens that the issue of system versus
the Christian faith has been debated more
than a hundred years ago.
And that encounter between system and anti-system
is very relevant to any examination of philosophical
theology to-day.
Certainly Tillich, who is often critical of
Hegel, nearly always speaks in praise of Kierkegaard,
and he gives such an important place in his
own thinking to the category of existence
that he seems at times to be travelling in
the Danish thinker's footsteps.
The System and the Gospel A Critique Of Paul
Tillich by Kenneth Hamilton 1963 MacMillan
Press p. 37
