Summary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (page 5)

§2 – This §2 is of particular importance: it is here that the thinker often regarded as a pioneer of existentialism defines what he means by 'existing'.

This is therefore an inaugural moment, opening a movement of thought centred on the notion of existence. Earlier thinkers had devoted certain reflections to this notion, but had not placed it at the centre of their doctrine. Kierkegaard does so, and this is one of the passages in which that founding shift takes place.

In fact, we understand existence better when we think of it as a verb in the active voice: 'to exist'.

First of all, it is an effort, a task to be accomplished—one that most people flee because of its difficulty:

Most people […] marry and take up positions in life, as a result of which, in order to keep up appearances, they must finish something, obtain results […] In this way one frees oneself from the duty of being genuinely attentive to the wearisome difficulties contained in the simplest statement of all: to exist as a human being. ¹

This is a theme that will later be taken up by other existentialist thinkers such as Sartre—man flees his freedom and the infinity of possibilities opening before him—or Heidegger, with his critique of the inauthenticity of the 'they', naturally developing what is here still only in germ.

To exist is an effort because it is nothing other than becoming: Since the existing subject is existing […] man is therefore in becoming. Or again: Becoming is the thinker's very existence.

It is a process that is as much negative as positive; and since the subjective thinker's thought must correspond to the form of his existence, the properly existing subjective thinker […] never ceases to be as negative as he is positive.

Kierkegaard adopts the Hegelian terminology of the positive and the negative. For the Hegelians, positive knowledge is sense-certainty, historical knowledge, or the speculative result. The negative moment corresponds to scepticism. The subjective thinker Kierkegaard describes does not choose between these two positions but dwells in the ceaseless movement from one to the other:

He knows the negativity of the infinite in existence; he never ceases to keep open this wound of negativity—a wound which is sometimes salvation (others let the wound close up and become deluded positives); in communication, he expresses the same thing. That is why he is never a man who teaches, but a man who learns; and never ceasing to be as negative as he is positive, he never ceases to strive.

Here again we find the figure of Socrates, who cast doubt on his interlocutors' ideas—the negative moment—yet never ceased to seek—the positive moment.

Kierkegaard assimilates the positive to the comic, and the negative to pathos; hence, that the existing subjective thinker is as positive as he is negative can also be expressed by saying that he has as much sense of the comic as of pathos. In this way he reproduces the dialectic at work at the very heart of existence:

Existence itself—existing—is an effort, and is as much pathetic as comic: pathetic, because the effort is infinite, that is to say directed towards the infinite, because it is the realisation of the infinite, which signifies the highest pathos; comic, because the effort is an inner contradiction.

Once again, Socrates wonderfully embodies the figure of the subjective thinker—not only through his humour, but also through the tragic seriousness he displays in drinking the hemlock.

Finally, Kierkegaard offers a last determination of existence, defining life as a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, in the same way that Plato defined Love as a synthesis of poverty and wealth in the Symposium: But what is existence? It is that child begotten by the infinite and the finite, by the eternal and the temporal, and which consequently never ceases to strive. In the end, the analogy becomes an identity: Love evidently means existence.

This second point has clarified Kierkegaard's conception of existence.

We can now understand what is distinctive about the subjective thinker and, beyond that, about the existing human being. This cannot be denied or fled—our nature resists the claims of systematic thinkers and objective thinkers: Even if a man occupies himself with logic all his life, he still does not thereby become logic, but exists himself in other categories.

It is time to move on to the third essential point Kierkegaard discerned in Lessing's thought.

§3 – In this third moment, the author of Philosophical Fragments returns to the problem that lay at the origin of that book: Can one build an eternal blessedness upon a historical knowledge?

He credits Lessing with having awakened him to the problem of the 'leap'—the justification of the passage from a historical fact (the coming of Christ) to an eternal truth. He then adds clarifications on one point or another within this problem, which requires a good knowledge of Philosophical Fragments in order to grasp its full interest.

We therefore invite you to refer to our presentation of Philosophical Fragments if you wish to understand this third moment in depth, where Lessing, Jacobi, and Mendelssohn are brought into dialogue. We shall pass quickly over this part, and come directly to the fourth and final moment of this section devoted to Lessing.

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