Summary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (page 3)

Faith has no need of proof; it must even regard it as its enemy. ¹ And if the believer makes his decision by virtue of a proof, he would be on the point of abandoning faith.

The objective approach paradoxically misses its object—Christianity—which it claims to study, because this object belongs essentially to the sphere of subjectivity, which eludes it by nature:

Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion—and at its maximum, passion taking an infinitely personal interest in one's eternal blessedness.

Faith is first and foremost a decision: I decide to believe in a God who was incarnate two thousand years ago in the person of Christ. Yet as soon as one eliminates subjectivity, and from subjectivity passion, and from passion infinite interest, there is, in short, no decision at all—neither in this problem nor in any other, and every essential decision lies in subjectivity.

The objective approach is not decision but observation, which requires remaining neutral and impartial: An observer […] feels no infinite need for decision on any point.

The historical approach can focus not on the Bible but on the Church.

The proponents of this second method maintain that the Bible, owing to its many obscurities and imprecisions, cannot constitute a sufficiently solid foundation for delivering to us what the truth of Christianity might be.

The Church, by contrast, could play this role. For we know what the Church is: it is no longer a fragmentary testimony from the past, forever distorted by the centuries that have elapsed, but a present, contemporary, living institution which we can analyse: The difficulty touching the New Testament as something past now seems to be removed in the Church, which is, as is well known, something present.

Kierkegaard takes aim here at Grundtvig, a Danish Lutheran pastor of the period: it was he who proposed this change of perspective in the objective study of Christianity, and the idea aroused considerable interest.

The problem is that the Church, too, is the result of centuries of development, and therefore constitutes an object just as historical—and thus just as uncertain—as the Bible. The confession of faith, for instance, which is one of the pillars of this institution—does it have the same meaning today as it did over the twenty centuries that preceded us? Probably not.

Thus we see that the approximation begins again. The objective approach is definitively the realm of approximation, not that of absolute truth: It is impossible, in historical problems, to find an objective decision such that no doubt can creep in. This too shows that the problem must be posed subjectively, and that it is precisely a misunderstanding to want to secure oneself objectively.

But in any case, the fundamental issue remains the same: the truth of Christianity resides in faith—that movement of the spirit which one will never grasp if subjectivity is set aside. One must not naïvely suppose that if only the objective truth is solid, the subject is quite ready to enter into it; in fact, if truth is spirit, it is inward appropriation, and not an immediate and wholly casual relation between an immediate spirit and a set of doctrinal propositions.

From all this it follows that whoever has only an objective Christianity and nothing else is eo ipso a pagan; for Christianity is precisely a matter of spirit, of subjectivity, and of inwardness.

The objective approach to the truth of Christianity can also take a second form: philosophical speculation. This examines Christianity from the standpoint of eternal truths discovered by pure reason—what is meant here is metaphysics in the Kantian sense of the term.

Normally, Kierkegaard uses 'speculation' to mean Hegelian doctrine; but here it is philosophy more generally that is in view, since he refers to the Greeks and acknowledges that he himself engages in it:

To deny the value of speculation […] would, in my eyes, amount to prostituting oneself, and would be particularly foolish on the part of someone whose time is devoted to it for the most part, according to his feeble powers; particularly foolish on the part of someone who admires the Greeks.

One might expect that, in this chapter, Kierkegaard would launch a systematic critique of Hegelian speculation—but this is not the case. He seems to focus on speculation in general—that is, on metaphysical inquiry into God: his essence, his existence, and so on.

His critique, fairly brief compared with the one directed at the historical approach, has two main points.

First, philosophy claims to doubt everything: to accept no presupposition, to call into question the ideas it examines. Yet in reality it accepts several presuppositions as self-evident—among them the idea that we are Christians, and therefore that Christianity is a historical fact (thus converging with the historical approach).

But nothing could be less certain. One imagines oneself Christian because one lives in a country defined as such. Kierkegaard is ironic: if someone doubted it, his wife would reply: But you are, all the same, a Dane; does geography not say that the Christian, Lutheran religion prevails in Denmark? […] are you not a good subject in a Christian state? […] so you are a Christian.

In reality, most people living in Denmark and in other so-called Christian countries do not have faith—at least not in the demanding sense Kierkegaard gives to it: 'At the present time, an authentic believer's discourse is perhaps what one hears most rarely in the whole of Europe.'

Secondly, he uses the same argument as for the historical approach—and we shall therefore pass over it quickly, having already examined it: If Christianity is essentially subjectivity, it is a mistake for the observer to be objective. An illuminating example makes the point: a marriage is an objective, historical fact that takes place on a certain date and in a certain location.

Yet behind this historical fact there is a love story which is its true foundation—and its only true reality: the ceremony is a hollow formality if love is not present in the minds of the two spouses. The reality of the phenomenon lies in subjectivity—in the subjectivity of the two lovers—not in the objective facts that follow from it. The same is true of Christianity: Christianity did not allow itself to be observed objectively, precisely because it aims to bring subjectivity to its highest pitch.

This first stage of reflection has thus enabled us to recognise the limits of the objective approach. It is therefore necessary to turn towards an entirely different way of approaching Christianity—one that gives pride of place to subjectivity—and it is in this direction that Kierkegaard will now invite us to move.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading