Summary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (page 4)

Second Part: The Subjective Problem. The Relation of the Subject to the Truth of Christianity

First Section: On Lessing

Kierkegaard pays tribute to Lessing, who, in his view, grasped the dead end to which an objective approach to religion leads. It is not a matter of placing oneself under Lessing's authority—which would be precisely an attempt to become objective ¹—but of bearing witness to one's respect for him, and above all to one's joy at no longer feeling alone: Kierkegaard is no longer isolated, as a thinker, in fierce opposition to the fashion of the age, which was wholly turned towards Hegelianism.

If a poor amateur thinker, a chimerical speculative spirit, who, like a poor tenant, lives in a garret in an immense building […] had the suspicion that there must be, somewhere, a fault in the foundations […] saw that his way of expressing himself was so different from the generally prevailing intellectual fashion […]; if, I say, this amateur thinker, this chimerical speculative spirit suddenly made the acquaintance of a celebrated man […] [in whom one finds] traces of some of his painful thoughts, ah, what joy! what a feast in the little garret when this poor tenant consoles himself with the great man's renown.

He does not admire him as a scholar, an erudite man, a poet, or a sage, but because he has precisely grasped this Archimedean point of religious feeling, which Kierkegaard sums up as follows: He withdrew into the religious solitude of subjectivity […], was not seduced into becoming world-historical or systematic, but understood and knew how to preserve the conviction that the religious concerned Lessing, Lessing alone, just as it concerns every human being in the same way.

By 'systematic' and 'world-historical', Kierkegaard is implicitly referring to Hegel. Hegelian philosophy does indeed present itself as a system and claims to account for the course of universal History—the self-unfolding of Spirit in the world. Each epoch, each doctrine, is relativised as a mere moment in this unfolding of Spirit, which once again provokes Kierkegaard's acerbic critique: he laments that, for the Hegelians, Lessing is now regarded as no more than an imperceptible little station on the world-historical systematic railway line.

Kierkegaard employs other terms to ironise at Hegel's expense. Whenever he speaks of a 'Privatdozent', for instance, it should be understood that he is speaking of Hegel—referring to the academic status Hegel held at a certain period at the University of Jena: a position of little prestige and almost no pay.

Let us return to Lessing. What is difficult is that Lessing's thought eludes examination and is hard to summarise. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard sets out four essential points which he regards as significant.

But to what end? The aim is to describe the 'subjective thinker'—to show that there exists another form of thinking than objective thinking—and to present this alternative model, opposed to the one that was triumphant at the time: speculation, or science.

§1 – First, the subjective thinker is attentive to the form in which he expresses a truth: he communicates it indirectly, unlike objective thought, which is concerned only with the result and delivers it directly.

The subjective thinker does not merely express an idea: for him, every idea is at once an occasion to reflect on himself and to discover his inwardness: The reflection of inwardness is the subjective thinker's double reflection. In thinking, he thinks the universal; but in so far as he exists in this thinking, in so far as he inwardly appropriates it, he isolates himself subjectively more and more.

The objective content of the idea communicated—the result—is therefore less important in itself than the way in which it is communicated. It must liberate the other person by revealing to him his own inwardness, and for that reason it must be indirect: The secret of communication consists precisely in making the other free; and it is precisely for that reason that it must not be communicated directly, and that it is even sacrilegious [to do so].

The model for this kind of communication is Socrates: he is the subjective thinker who best illustrated this procedure. He reveals no truth directly. Through irony he says the opposite of what he really means; through the art of maieutics he helps his interlocutors to find the truth for themselves, without providing it to them; and finally, he withdraws to consult his daimon, in the silence of inwardness, and no one knows what comes of it.

Yet it is in the religious sphere that this kind of thought can fully unfold: This is all the more true the more essential the subjective is, and it is therefore true above all in the religious sphere.

And it is the mode Kierkegaard himself chose, by publishing works under the names of pseudonymous authors—Johannes Climacus for the Postscript, Johannes de Silentio for Fear and Trembling, and so on—an indirect procedure that he explains at the end of the book.

To sum up, the subjective thinker makes communication into a work of art in which secrecy plays an essential role, since nothing is revealed and everything is suggested:

Ordinary communication, objective thought, has no secrets; only thoroughly reflected subjective thought has secrets: all its essential content is essentially secret, because it does not allow itself to be communicated directly. This is the meaning of the secret.

This specific relation to truth ultimately rests on the fact that the subjective thinker is an existing individual and, as such, is concerned only with becoming, and omits the result. What does it mean to be an existing individual? This is the second essential point Kierkegaard will examine.

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