Summary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (page 6)

§4 – In this fourth point, Kierkegaard begins by opposing Lessing's humility to Hegel's presumption, on the question of truth.

Lessing is indeed the one who wrote these lines: If God held in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the sole and ever-living impulse towards truth, even with the additional condition that I should always and eternally err, and if he said to me: choose! I would humbly throw myself upon his left hand and say: Father, give! for truth belongs to you alone! ¹

Hegel, by contrast, intends to present a system that grasps the truth of the historical process in all its dimensions: its origin, the essential meaning of its different moments, and its finality, through the notion of Absolute Spirit. It is nothing less than the truth of universal history—logic, philosophy, religion, and so on—that Hegel claims to unveil across his entire body of work.

It is this presumption that Kierkegaard attacks. First, he denies the very reality of the Hegelian system: I am ready to fall down in adoration before the system—if only I can manage to see it. So far, I have not succeeded. A system is a set of ideas deduced from one another that form a whole in which each finds its place and legitimacy. This leads to the thought that a system can only be complete and finished: A system and a closed whole are more or less one and the same thing; therefore, when the system is not finished, there is no system. In other words, a half-finished system is nonsense.

Yet, according to Kierkegaard, Hegel's doctrine has an unfinished, fragmentary, lacunary character. It is therefore not the truth, but only an effort towards the truth—as Lessing described above.

Why then call the accomplished fragment a system? To give such a grand title to a mere fragment is, in Kierkegaard's eyes, nothing but a marketing trick, to use our contemporary jargon:

If, in the newspaper […] I call my work a continuous effort—alas, who will then buy it or admire me? But if I call it the system, the absolute system, everyone will buy the system—there will remain only this difficulty: that what the adherent of the system wants is not the system.

For Kierkegaard, the system can only be unfinished because something essential escapes it: existence. This is the idea that grounds the legitimacy of existentialism as a philosophical current, and which he sums up in two propositions:

Thus (a) there can be a logical system
(b) but there cannot be a system of existence.

The author of the Postscript will develop each of these two propositions in turn.

One must clearly distinguish the spheres—whereas Hegel confuses them, mixing everything together in his false synthesis. Nothing that concerns existence should find its way into logic, and vice versa. Now existence, as we have seen, is becoming. Movement is therefore a category that belongs to existence, not to logic—contrary to what Hegel maintains.

We know that this is Hegel's principal, revolutionary contribution to logic—one that caused such a stir: the introduction of movement into logic through the notion of dialectic, which proceeds from a term to its contrary and then to their synthesis.

This is a contribution Kierkegaard does not accept:

If a logical system is to be constructed, one must above all be careful not to admit into it anything that is subject to the dialectic of existence—anything, therefore, that is only because it exists or has existed, not because it is. From this it follows quite simply that Hegel's incomparable and incomparably admired discovery—of bringing movement into logic—consists precisely in introducing confusion into logic.

In his view, it would be absurd to posit movement as the basis in a sphere where it is unthinkable, or to let movement explain logic, whereas logic cannot explain movement.

Kierkegaard thus rejects Hegelian dialectic as a procedure that confuses two irreducible spheres. This mistake stems from the fact that Hegel remained blind to the notion of existence, failing to understand that it is the true point of departure—the point from which one must begin.

This leads him to attack the Hegelian system from a new angle: its beginning. According to Hegel, the system begins with 'the immediate'. But Kierkegaard grants this chronological and ontological privilege to existence. As we have seen, we are existing beings, and that is the basis of everything; everything else can only be founded upon it.

Thus: How does the system begin with the immediate—that is, does it begin immediately with it? To this question one must answer: no, without qualification. If one admits that the system comes after existence […] then the system comes afterwards and therefore does not begin immediately with the immediate. Here again he grounds the legitimacy of existentialism by granting existence this chronological privilege: that of being the true beginning.

In any case, the immediate cannot constitute a genuine beginning, since it never is, but is annulled when it is. It is, like pure being, a mere chimera.

After criticising the notion of 'bad infinity'—which mixes ethics and logic, two spheres that are nevertheless irreducible to one another—he turns to the second point: the impossibility of a system of existence.

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