Existentialism

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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Søren Kierkegaard

1846

Kierkegaard's longest and most systematic work — published pseudonymously as Johannes Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor — was described by its author as the centre of gravity of the entire authorship. It takes the question posed in the earlier Philosophical Fragments — "Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness?" — and develops a sustained polemic against the Hegelian attempt to make Christianity philosophically comprehensible. Subjectivity is truth, Climacus insists: religious existence cannot be mediated by objective speculation but only by an individual's infinite passionate inwardness. The stages on life's way — aesthetic, ethical, religious — are revisited, and the concept of indirect communication is articulated for the first time as the only honest mode of religious address.