Concluding Unscientific PostscriptSøren Kierkegaard

The Concluding Unscientific Postscript is Kierkegaard's longest pseudonymous work, published in 1846 under the name Johannes Climacus. It presents itself as an afterword to the much shorter Philosophical Fragments, but it is in fact the most sustained attack on Hegelian philosophy in the nineteenth century and Kierkegaard's fullest statement of what it means to exist as an individual before God.

The central claim is that truth, for an existing individual, is subjectivity. This does not mean truth is whatever one feels. It means that the decisive questions (Does God exist? Is there an eternal happiness? How should I live?) cannot be settled by disinterested speculation. They require passionate inward appropriation. The Hegelian system claims to comprehend existence from a standpoint outside it; Climacus argues that no existing human being ever occupies such a standpoint. To exist is to be in the middle of things, choosing under uncertainty, and the attempt to transcend this condition through pure thought is comic self-deception.

Kierkegaard distinguishes two forms of religiousness. Religiousness A is immanent: the individual relates to an eternal happiness through resignation and suffering. Religiousness B is the specifically Christian paradox: the eternal has entered time in the person of Christ, and this cannot be thought, only believed. The Postscript does not argue anyone into faith. It clears away the illusion that faith is something one could be argued into.