Concluding Unscientific Postrict to Philosophical Fragments is probably the most philosophically "laden" of all Kierkegaard's writings. It marks the pinnacle of his pseudonymous authorship which was carried out in the mode of "indirect communication" (as opposed to the direct, non-pseudonymous authorship of his religious works). The initial title in outlines was "Logical Issues", but Kierkegaard eventually changed this neutral heading to a more humorous version (see explanation below). In accord with this change two subtitles now read "A Mimical-Pathetical-Dialectical Compilation, An Existential Contribution". The work was published under pseudonym (alias) Johannes Climacus in 1846.

Title Parts:

The title is a composite that could be best explained in a reversed order of its components.

Postscript (PS): An addendum to something previously written, in this case to Philosophical Fragments (1844). As the addendum exceeds five times its base, it is obvious that Kierkegaard is making fun of his own urge to compliment his previous "pamphlet" (also a self-ironizing term) with a "compilation" of prolonged after-thoughts on speculative philosophy.

Unscientific: This adjective clearly indicates that for Kierkegaard existing is not a science or a speculative reflection upon the vicissitudes of human life. Consequently, it is not something that could be thought, obtained from others or transmitted to others. It is something very simple and individual. As there are no partnerships in faith, by the same token there are no schoolmasters in the art of existing. No philosophical system or speculative construction could replace first-hand experience and passion. "In relation to existing there is for all existing persons one schoolmaster - existence itself." (Journals, iii 2809, 2823)
Note: This statement is directed against Hegel and abstract philosophizing in general, but should not be understood as a repudiation of thinking and reflection tout court. Kierkegaard is a thinker himself, and mysology was the last thing he would subscribe himself to. As we shall see below, he only wanted to distinguish between essential knowledge pertaining to existence and accidental knowledge pertaining just to our learning and social roles.

Concluding: With this adjective Kierkegaard announces the end of his activity as a literary author. This is the reason why he signed the book with the pseudonym Climacos (The Ladder) indicating that he has reached the final point in his literary career. He planned to continue writing but only under his real name and in the form of criticism or religious authorship. However he soon found himself enmeshed in several polemics which prevented him from terminating his literary activity and so the Postscript became rather the turning point between his aesthetic and religious oeuvre then the final end of indirect authorship.

Issues:

Note: Kierkegaard understands fully the nature of logical and epistemological issues surrounding the philosophical analysis of truth. Common charges against him to the effect that he was simply ignoring the epistemological foundation of truth while espousing his "wild relativism" and "subjectivism" are as superficial as unjustified.

Kierkegaard conceives correspondence between thoughts and objects as symmetrical and transitive both ways. Objects could be true if they correspond to the idea, or ideas could be called true if they correspond closely to objects.

For German Idealists being or reality must agree with reason as expressed in thoughts. For British Empiricists thought is true when it agrees with the real.

In both cases we have a "reduplication" of thought and reality, the only difference being in the direction of this "doubling".

In both cases two things are for Kierkegaard of utmost importance:
(1) to understand "what is meant by being" (abstraction or reality), and
(2) not to get lost as into "the indeterminate" (an abstract being, "a phantom").

As to (1) Kierkegaard distinguishes between being in an abstract sense and a concrete being in existential sense. The former is at best ideal, the latter is real and actual, although it could be degraded into something abstract. If that happens (2) the subject becomes a "phantom" residing within the "fantastic realm" of tautologies like those of Parmenides: one is one, being is being. A knowing subject dissolved into an abstraction can easily conform to an abstract being (A=A), but this identity is empty. Appropriate comparisons here are those with "a fantastic rendezvous in the clouds", or "an unfruitful embrace" (like Axion's).

Existence:

"The knowing spirit" is a Hegelian phrase for individual existence involved in the cognitive process ("the inquirer").

(I) Objective Reflection: It leads to the "objective truth" allegedly unaffected by our subjectivity and without affecting it itself. In order to accomplish this ideal of chemically pure knowledge it "makes the subject accidental, and thereby transforms existence into something indifferent". Its hailed neutrality makes up its "objective validity". This type of objective truth occurs equally in mathematics and historical sciences. In both cases "abstract thinking" as exemplified in "objective reflection" leads "away from the subject" whose real status and interests become irrelevant. Paradoxically, by making the subject indifferent objective reflection makes the truth itself indifferent because in itself it is not "interesting".

(II) Subjective Reflection: It turns inwardly to the subject and attempts to find the truth in the inwardness of subjectivity or, as Kierkegaard puts it, "to realize the truth" in "intensification of inwardness". The ultimate objective in this approach is to reach "the subjectivity of the subject". Conversely, in affirming "the subjectivity of the subject" subjective reflection suppresses objectivity as a "vanishing factor". The constant memento in this approach remains that the subject is "an existing individual".

Existence is "a process of becoming", never something given and finished. (Sartre will build upon this in his philosophy of freedom.)

Consequences:

(1) The correspondence theory of truth loses ground in the realm of human existence: the notion of identity becomes "a chimera of abstraction" if both thought and being are constantly changing. If the knower is an existing individual, an individual who lives in time, this notion is inapplicable. Fichte's formula "I am I" is such an abstraction, an example of "fantastic realism" that does not speak anything to a "particular individual". Speculative philosophy leads to abstract formulas without explaining how they relate to particular individuals.

(2) The only meaningful truth for a particular individual becomes here one that expresses temporal expectations and current approximations. If the object of self-knowing constantly supercedes itself then no stage in the process of becoming is final and thus no statement could be the final truth about it. Concrete beings can never be adequately and definitely cognized - our ideas about ourselves are always "subject to correction and improvement". Therefore the "I-am-I" point is non-existent as is any geometrical point.

Note 1: "Modern philosophy holds passion in contempt." This does not hold true for many great thinkers, including Hegel, who became reknown for his claim that nothing great happens in history without passion. Lessing took passion as the most fundamental characteristic of being human. In the same vein Feuerbach asserted that "only passion is the mark of existence" and "only what is an object of passion really is". Without acknowledging his debt to this tradition Kierkegaard agrees that passion is the ultimate source of personal integration. Only through passion can a person begin to collect herself and acquire a direction that unites otherwise dissipated life plans and inclinations. The decision to adopt certain life-style is never just an intellectual decision based solely on some objective cognitions. It is always ultimately rooted in what a person cares about and deeply values, i.e. in passions. Only through passion intellectually conceived possibilities could be transformed into actualities. The individual synthetizes the eternal and the temporal by reduplicating timeless ideals and norms in time and concrete existence. In this respect passions are much more important than intellectual insights or ideas. It is possible to imaginatively conceive many possibilities and to be able to think them through without ever humanly existing.

Note 2: Passion reveals interest in existence, that care for Self which is the engine of individual strivings. To have a passion means to care for something or someone, as oposed to the indifference of the objective attitude. If I care about something I do not regard it as valueless. The object of passion is always considered by passion as worthy of the caring passion. Thus we speak about being passionate about something in the sense of being enthusiastic. This usage of the term stresses the active moment of passion which is regarded as the source of free action. Kierkegaard rejects the notion that passion is just an irrational and involuntary emotion that takse control over us from without, as if we are only passive object of its unpredictable and unaccountable force (for instance, "he murdered her in a fit of passion"). He recognizes that passion possesses a moment of passivity, since we cannot induce a passion deliberately. For instance, it is not possible to decide to have a love or religious passion. Passionsa re not intentionally created, but they could be developed and cultivated. In that sense the indivisual is responsible for them as his own state of mind. The individual also bears a credit for having a creative passion, artistic, teaching, religious. Possessing a passion is what makes someone better than a person of the same ocupation or activity, not physical abilities or the intensity of desire.

(A) Essential Knowledge - the knowledge which has an inward relation to existence. The essential relation means that there is an essential relationship between the knowledge and the knower which is an existing individual (the Latin root esse = to be in "essential" is semantically linked to existential = to exist). "Only ethical and ethico-religious knowledge has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower."
Note: The quality of being essentially related should not be confused with either idealist or realist identity between thought and being. In practical life and religion it does not make sense to speak about proving the conformity between being and thought as embodied in objective truth.

(B) Accidental Knowledge - the knowledge which does not inwardly relate itself to existence in the reflection of inwardness (it comes along coincidentally). This type of knowledge is characteristic for all objective and descriptive sciences that require an absolute disengagement of the knowing subject.

Mediation presupposes movement, but it is being claimed by objective abstract thinking which brings movement to a permanent halt in its effort to capture the totality and present it in the final picture.

Objective knowledge may have the existent for its object, but the knowing subject is an existing individual in the process of becoming.

Tautology, from the Greek to auto legein = to say the same. In linguistics, a pleonasm, a redundant phrase like "a young boy". In logic, explicating in the predicate term what is already contained in the subject term ("Bachelors are unmarried males."). The truth of tautologies is established either through the logical form of the expression (A=A) or through the meanings of the involved concepts. Experience cannot falsify tautologies.

Speculative Philosophy, literally, the philosophy that "mirrors" the existing consequences unto their invisible first causes; therefore it is "theoretical" and abstract; Kierkegaard uses the expression either to denote German Idealism or any philosophy that curtails thinking from its existential ground and so creating "tautologies", "fantastic beings" and "phantoms" of abstraction.

Analytic Statements, statements that are necessarily true either by their form or by their meaning (A=A, "I am I", or "All mothers are women" and "All obese people are fat").

Reduplication, the term used by Kierkegaard to denote the reality "doubling" of what we think, that is to say, it refers to the realizion or "putting into practice" that "how one thinks one ought to live". To be able to "be what one says" one needs both the ability of subjective self-reflection and the strenght to carry out the insights into existence.

Mediation, (in German Vermittlung) the term used by Hegel to oppose the view that our knowledge of phenomenal and supernatural reality is direct (F. Jacobi). Hegel was convinced that unrelated existence is not possible and therefore the process of understanding reality consists in establishing links with the pertinent factors and instances. For Hegel, these connections and mediations already exist; the question is only to become aware of them and thus to overcome the illusion of immediacy through an insinght into the mediated immediacy. For Kierkegaard, individual existence could be mediated only through negation of its individuality.

Subjectivity, a whole host of concepts denoting inwardness: Ego, I, Self, consciousness, existence, spirit. For Kierkegaard it is the place of existential truth, which is defining for an individual. The term thus refers to the process by which an individual existentially appropriates what he thinks.

These defects of objective truth do not mean that it is irrelevant what a person believes. Kierkegaard wants to say only that proper objective beliefs are existentially worthless without the involvement of our subjectivity. In themselves they could lead to insanity even when presented as a disinterested commitment to pure truth and objectivity. A detached assistant professor is not less crazy than a passionate character who is out of touch with reality - in fact he is more pitiable (the president of the Plato society who does not believe in Plato's doctrines). The pervasive extension of scientific objectivity to the whole of life is ridiculuous and insane (causes a lack of emotional and human interest).

Appropriation:

Only when appropriated by a single individual, that is to say, when they penetrate the life-world, true propositions become existentially relevant. Truth can only exist in and through individual apprehension of it. On the other hand, proper subjectivity is not worthless even when it is not backed by proper beliefs. Why? Because it is possible for a person to be better than his beliefs. A preson with confused or even wrong moral ideas can act morally. Bertrand Russell disclaimed any cognitive distinction between good and bad and proclaimed it to be just a matter of emotions or taste. But still he was a great humanist in his life and an activist for peace and human dignity.

Decisiveness:

Objectivity lacks existential decisiveness. Only in subjectivity there is the decisiveness that realizes the untruth of the accepted obsession with objectivity. This is what makes up the "decisive passion of the infinite".

In this manner subjectivity and the subjective "how" constitute the truth. The definition of truth must reflect this antithesis to objectivity which is now being suspended.

Truth is an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness.

Signs:

There are many signs of divine omnipotence and wisdom in the worls. The order and regularity of the universe (teleology) nourish the hope of finding a God.
On the other hand, the sufferings of the innocent and many imprefections in the design gve rise to doubts, and speak against the idea.
The outcome is "an objective uncertainty". The more so it makes sense to compensate for it with "the entire passion of the infinite".
An objective uncertainty + the greatness of inwardness = faith.

Abraham
Socrates
Don Quixote

In the religiosity A (the religiousness of immamence) truth was conceived as residing within man. Subjectivity is ideally the truth but actually existed as untruth in paganism. This is why Climacus says that the "higher" expression for "subjectivity is the truth" begins by regarding subjectivity as untruth.