52 pages • 1 hour read
Søren KierkegaardConcluding Unscientific Postscript
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1846A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Modern Culture’s Contempt for the Individual
In the section on “The Subjective Thinker,” Kierkegaard states that “[e]ach age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man” (317). In the same section he asks: “[W]hat does a mere individual count for? Our age knows only too well how little it is” (317).
Throughout the Postscript, Kierkegaard positions himself as a spokesman for the individual against the “crowd”—the “crowd” often referencing the academically fashionable philosophy of Hegelianism. Instead of accepting such a system unquestioningly, Kierkegaard insists on developing an awareness of being an existing individual and, from that awareness, forming one’s own thoughts and opinions. His use of an assumed persona in the Postscript illustrates his desire to eschew direct, dogmatic philosophical discourse in favor of opening a dialogue with the reader—one that will cultivate the kind of subjectivity he espouses.
Kierkegaard believes that the “collective idea” increasingly dominates modern thought and society. People, particularly intellectuals, think of themselves collectively (e.g., as members of a race or of their historical era). People want to lose themselves in a social or intellectual movement—i.e., “in the totality of things, in world-history” (317). For Kierkegaard, such absorption in externals and abstractions masks a shame in being an individual, existing human being: “[I]n the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human” (317). In essence, modern people are ignoring the problems of existence because they are too difficult and uncertain. Instead, people are losing themselves in abstract and external endeavors that give an illusion of certitude, conferring pride and a sense of intellectual accomplishment.
However, an individual human being is inherently more real than these abstractions, and denying this comes with serious consequences. Hegelianism claims that we now understand (or are close to understanding) everything in the universe, whether philosophical or scientific; the system is completed. Kierkegaard insists that our lives are works in progress, and nothing is finished while we are still in this earthly life. We must therefore concentrate on our own individual existence, which is a continuous and lifelong task.
The Importance of Passion in Life
For Kierkegaard, passion is the decisive element in the life of an existing individual. Passion is the intense interest in our own existence and our eternal happiness—the “passion of the infinite” (209)—and colors all of our choices and actions. It originates “when existence is interpenetrated with reflection” (313). Passion is deeply connected with faith because we must believe in God and the promise of eternal happiness, which Kierkegaard insists we cannot understand as rational certitudes.
As the expression of faith, passion is connected with uncertainty. We choose passionately to believe in something even when it seems doubtful and improbable. In fact, Kierkegaard says, we can only believe in something that we do not have complete rational certainty about. This is what constitutes the leap of faith: “For if passion is eliminated, faith no longer exists, and certainty and passion do not go together” (30). If we had complete rational certainty about a proposition, we would not believe it but know it. Because it is deeply connected with faith, passion also coexists with paradox: “[P]aradox and passion are a mutual fit” (206). One can develop strong feelings and a sense of involvement about the ultimate questions—about such propositions as God becoming man and the human need to maintain a relation to eternity in the midst of time—without resolving them.
This decision to have faith against all odds constitutes the inner existential drama of life, and it is carried out in a spirit of passion. Being passionate places one “in the extremity of existence” and gives inner drama to human life (206). This distinguishes the kind of passion Kierkegaard is discussing from the kind of passion associated, for instance, with outward-directed emotions of lust or anger. Kierkegaard seems to place a higher importance on passion than on any other human faculty: “But passion first and last; for it is impossible to think about existence in existence without passion” (313).
There Are Truths That Exceed the Power of Reason
Kierkegaard positions himself as an anti-rationalist: an opponent of Enlightenment thought and its legacy of exalting human reason as the key to knowledge and happiness. Kierkegaard instead stresses the limitations of reason and the need for such things as imagination and faith. Reason cannot of itself generate the passion that is necessary to pursue eternal happiness. Scientific analysis cannot absolutely prove the objects of religious faith. Poetry and art are necessary to human life, and they come from a place in the human psyche other than the rational faculty.
Kierkegaard complains that today “poetry is crowded aside and dismissed as a transcended phase, because it is closely connected with the imagination” (311). This is an example of how rationalist thought loses sight of actual human existence: “[I]n existence itself […] a human being […] must preserve the poetic in his life, and all his thinking must not be permitted to disturb for him its magic” (311). Rationalism even influences religious thought when the latter seeks to prove God’s existence or the historical veracity of events in Jesus’s life instead of emphasizing the need to make a commitment of faith about these things. Thus, rationalist thought (e.g., Hegelianism) aggrandizes reason to the point where reason takes over areas of experience that do not belong to it.
In “The Subjective Thinker 3,” Kierkegaard evokes the “three transcendentals” to elaborate on his point. The principles of the true, the good, and the beautiful are coequal and “belong essentially to every human existence” (311), and “to lose imagination and feeling” is “quite as bad as losing […] reason” (311). Rational thought should not—and indeed cannot—destroy the validity that poetry and religion have in human life, which human experience proves. Thus, instead of opposing reason as such, Kierkegaard advocates for a proper use of reason and an equal place for other human faculties.
