Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
Based on Wikipedia: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
The Book That Made "Subjectivity Is Truth" Famous
In 1846, a Danish philosopher published what he called a "postscript" to an earlier work. The original book ran about 90 pages. The postscript? Nearly 500 pages. This wasn't a minor clarification. It was an intellectual assault on the most dominant philosophical system of the nineteenth century.
Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments remains one of the most influential works in Western philosophy, famous above all for a single provocative claim: "Subjectivity is truth."
That phrase has echoed through more than a century and a half of philosophical debate. But what did it actually mean? And why did Kierkegaard feel compelled to write nearly five hundred pages to explain it?
The Enemy: Hegel's Grand System
To understand the Postscript, you need to understand what Kierkegaard was fighting against. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had constructed what he believed was a complete philosophical system—a way of understanding absolutely everything through pure reason and logic. His Science of Logic claimed to trace the development of all reality through a dialectical process, where opposing ideas clash and resolve into higher syntheses.
Hegel's system was breathtaking in its ambition. It promised to explain history, religion, art, politics, and human consciousness itself through a single unified framework. By the time Kierkegaard came of age, Hegelianism dominated European intellectual life. It had become, in effect, the System—capital S.
Kierkegaard found this intolerable.
Not because he thought Hegel was stupid. Quite the opposite. Kierkegaard saw Hegel as the most consistent system-builder who had ever lived. That was precisely the problem. Kierkegaard believed that no logical system, however elegant, could capture what matters most about human existence. You cannot systematize the individual human life. You cannot reduce faith, choice, and suffering to a series of logical propositions.
The Pseudonym Problem
Here's something strange about the Postscript: Kierkegaard didn't put his own name on it as the author. The book is credited to "Johannes Climacus," one of several fictional voices Kierkegaard invented to explore ideas from different perspectives.
Why the elaborate game?
Kierkegaard used pseudonyms to create distance between himself and his ideas. He wanted readers to engage with the arguments themselves rather than simply accepting or rejecting them based on who wrote them. The fictional authors weren't mouthpieces for Kierkegaard's beliefs—they were characters with their own perspectives, limitations, and blind spots.
But the Postscript contains a twist. Unlike his other pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard attached his real name to this one—as the editor rather than the author. This unusual move suggests the book held special significance for him, even if he wasn't willing to claim its arguments as definitively his own.
What "Subjectivity Is Truth" Actually Means
The phrase "subjectivity is truth" sounds like a recipe for relativism. If truth is subjective, doesn't that mean everyone's opinion is equally valid? Doesn't that lead to intellectual chaos?
Kierkegaard meant something more subtle.
Consider a scientific fact: water boils at 100 degrees Celsius under standard atmospheric pressure. That's objectively true. You can verify it in a laboratory. But knowing this fact doesn't transform your life. You can memorize thousands of such facts and remain exactly the same person you were before.
Now consider a different kind of truth: the truth about how you should live. Should you devote yourself to pleasure? To duty? To God? These questions cannot be answered by stepping back and analyzing them dispassionately, the way a scientist studies water. They demand that you commit yourself. They require what Kierkegaard called "inwardness."
Truth about existence, Kierkegaard argued, isn't something you observe from the outside. It's something you live. It's something you become. The person who treats their own life as a problem to be solved through detached analysis has already lost something essential.
As one interpreter put it, truth for Kierkegaard is "something to be attained, actualized, lived." It's not an objective fact you can examine disinterestedly, like a spectator in a laboratory. Real truth about human existence requires mobilizing your freedom toward self-becoming.
The Leap of Faith
Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard's fictional author, traces a path through different ways of living. There's the aesthetic life, devoted to pleasure and immediate experience. There's the ethical life, committed to duty and moral principle. And finally there's the religious life, culminating in Christianity.
But here's what's crucial: you cannot reason your way smoothly from one stage to the next. No amount of logical argument will convince you to abandon the aesthetic for the ethical, or the ethical for the religious. At each transition point, you must leap.
The move to genuine Christian faith involves what the early theologian Eduard Geismar called "an existential leap." Through discipline, resignation, suffering, and guilt, a person may gradually approach the threshold. But the final step isn't a logical conclusion. It's a decision—what Kierkegaard called "a crucial decision in the temporal moment."
This is what gives offense to human reason. We want neat arguments. We want proofs. We want to be convinced. But Christianity, for Kierkegaard, presents itself as a paradox. It cannot be domesticated by philosophy. It must be embraced in all its strangeness, or not at all.
Against System-Building
Kierkegaard was scathing about philosophers who tried to construct comprehensive systems of thought. In the Postscript, he mocked what he called the attempt to create an "existential system"—as if human existence could be captured in a set of logical categories.
"A logical system is possible," he wrote, "but an existential system is impossible."
You can create a consistent system of abstract ideas. But the moment you try to include actual existence—your existence, my existence—the system falls apart. Why? Because existence is unfinished. It's in process. It involves genuine choices that haven't been made yet. A system, by contrast, is complete and closed. It looks backward at what has already happened. It cannot capture the open-ended quality of a life being lived.
Hegel had many critics in his lifetime, but most of them attacked his system because they thought they could build a better one. Kierkegaard attacked him for being a system-builder at all. The problem wasn't the details of Hegel's philosophy. The problem was the very ambition to systematize existence.
The Terror of Christianity
There's a revealing passage in Kierkegaard's private journals that sheds light on what drove him to write the Postscript. He confessed that when he began his authorship, he had "a far more profound impression of the terror of Christianity than any clergyman in the country."
He experienced what he called "fear and trembling such as perhaps no one else had."
But this didn't make him want to abandon Christianity. Instead, it made him suspicious of those who used religion to terrorize others. He had suffered. He believed he was chosen for suffering. But he thought it would be cruel to use his own dark experience to upset "happy, loving lives that may very well be truly Christian."
So he wrote in a humorous tone, trying to hint at deeper truths without browbeating his readers. The Postscript is partly serious philosophy and partly elaborate irony. Kierkegaard wanted to be gentle with others while keeping his "heavy burden" to himself.
Either/Or: The Fundamental Choice
The literary critic Herbert Read summarized the Postscript by connecting it to Kierkegaard's most famous phrase: "either/or."
Life presents us with a fundamental choice. On one side stands what Kierkegaard called the aesthetic—the pursuit of pleasure, of distraction, of avoiding commitment. This includes not just hedonism but also a certain kind of philosophical detachment, the stance of someone who analyses existence without actually living it.
On the other side stands the religious—not just any religion, but what Kierkegaard considered true religion, characterized by "immediacy." This means direct engagement rather than endless reflection. It means commitment rather than speculation.
The Postscript is Kierkegaard's attempt to make clear that the religious alternative isn't just one option among many. It's the only alternative to every other possible way of living. You can have the aesthetic life in all its variations, or you can have genuine faith. There's no comfortable middle ground.
Was Kierkegaard an Existentialist?
Kierkegaard is routinely called the father of existentialism. His emphasis on individual choice, on authentic existence, on the impossibility of systematizing human life—all of this anticipates themes that would dominate twentieth-century philosophy.
But some scholars have pushed back against this characterization.
The philosopher Libuse Lukas Miller argued in 1957 that Kierkegaard used existential thinking "never as an end in itself but always as an offensive and defensive weapon in a battle on behalf of the Christian faith." His goal wasn't to establish a new philosophical school. It was apologetics—defending Christianity against what he saw as the rationalistic arrogance of his age.
In this view, calling Kierkegaard the father of existentialism misses what he actually cared about. He wasn't trying to create a new philosophy. He was trying to clear intellectual space for faith.
The same debate continues today. Scholars disagree about whether Kierkegaard held a libertarian view of free will (the idea that human choices are genuinely undetermined) or whether he was compatible with other views on freedom. What seems clear is that he believed human beings face real choices that cannot be resolved through abstract reasoning alone.
The Object Is the Truth: A Parody
The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner offered a clever response to Kierkegaard's famous dictum. In his 1947 book, Brunner parodied "subjectivity is truth" by proposing its opposite: "the object is the truth."
Brunner noticed a strange contradiction in modern thinking. People who claimed to be relativists—who said "everything is relative"—were often the same people who believed absolutely in material reality. They would say that truth is subjective while simultaneously insisting that the mind is "nothing but a product of cerebral processes."
This combination of "gross objectivism and bottomless subjectivism" struck Brunner as incoherent. Modern culture had increasingly reduced everything to measurable quantities. Pride in growing cities, admiration for millionaires, obsession with sports records—all of this represented what Brunner called "reverence for the quantum," a new version of worshipping the golden calf.
Brunner's parody highlights something important about Kierkegaard's project. He wasn't simply championing subjectivity against objectivity. He was warning against a particular kind of objective thinking that treats human existence as just another object to be analyzed, measured, and systematized.
Truth as Honest Self-Suspicion
The psychoanalyst Joseph H. Smith offered yet another interpretation of what Kierkegaard meant by "subjectivity is truth." Smith argued that Kierkegaard shifts attention from truth as a matter of propositions—statements that can be verified or falsified—to truth as a matter of persons.
There's a difference between knowing facts and being truthful. You can memorize all the correct answers and still be a fraud. You can speak accurately about the world and still deceive yourself about who you are.
Kierkegaard, in Smith's reading, is concerned with "the truth of persons and how that truth corresponds to the content of professed beliefs." The serious person always maintains "the honest suspicion of thyself." You must continually examine whether you actually live according to what you claim to believe.
This is uncomfortable. It's much easier to focus on abstract arguments about truth than to ask whether your own life is truthful. But Kierkegaard insisted on precisely this uncomfortable question.
Why the Book Still Matters
More than a century and a half after its publication, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript continues to provoke. Philosophers argue about what Kierkegaard really meant. Theologians debate his relationship to traditional Christianity. Existentialists claim him as a founder while some Christians insist he belongs to them alone.
Perhaps that's exactly what Kierkegaard would have wanted. A book that could be neatly categorized, whose meaning could be settled once and for all, would have failed on its own terms. It would have become just another piece in someone's system.
The Postscript resists that fate. It's too long, too ironic, too multilayered to be reduced to a set of propositions. It forces you to grapple with it. And in doing so, it enacts its own argument: that truth about existence isn't something you can stand outside of and observe. It's something you must work through, live through, become.
Kierkegaard called his book "unscientific" in the title—a deliberate provocation in an age that worshipped scientific method. He wasn't anti-science. He was simply insisting that the most important questions about human life cannot be answered the way we answer questions in physics or chemistry. They require a different kind of engagement. They require you.