Summary: Philosophical Fragments

In 1844, a year after the publication of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard published a new work: Philosophical Fragments.

The problem he wishes to examine in this book—and which underlies its entire development—is set out on the title page itself:

Can an eternal happiness be built upon historical knowledge? Can one begin from history in order to obtain an eternal certainty? Can such a point of departure have any interest other than a merely historical one?¹

What does this mean? The coming of Christ is a historical fact: Jesus was born, truly existed, and then died at the end of a long agony. Christianity, which developed out of that founding event, promises us a life after death and an eternal beatitude, if we have shown ourselves worthy of it, and if God is pleased to grant us the grace of it.

The problem is this: it seems impossible to deduce from a historical fact—that is, something singular and isolated in time—an eternal truth, valid for all time. There is a kind of logical leap here, which nothing can justify. Just as one cannot deduce from the fact that the sun rose yesterday (a historical fact) the assurance that it will rise until the end of time (an eternal truth), so one cannot appeal to the coming of Christ and conclude from it that we shall gain eternal life after death.

Lessing is the one who brought Kierkegaard to awareness of this problem, as he would later explain in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments:

Lessing said that accidental historical truths can never become a proof for eternal truths of reason, and that the transition by which one would build an eternal happiness upon a piece of historical news is a leap.

Thus, Lessing is only too happy to believe, like everyone else, that an Alexander lived and subjugated all of Asia; but who would risk, on that belief, anything of great and lasting importance, whose loss could not be replaced?”

We know that what is historical is contingent—it might not have happened. How can one found eternal and necessary truths upon such shifting ground? There is therefore a kind of gulf—and a leap which, apparently, nothing can justify, in Lessing’s own words: That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch that I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap.

We can now better grasp the aim Kierkegaard sets himself in this work: to legitimise this leap—to show why such an inference is possible in the case of Christianity, with regard to eternal beatitude.

This book is rather difficult to read; and the fact that this background is not made explicit here, but only clarified in a later work, adds to its obscurity.

In order to answer this problem, Kierkegaard begins—apparently—by moving away from it.

He revives an ancient question raised by Plato in the Meno: ‘Can truth be learnt?’ How can it be discovered? Can it be taught by a teacher to a pupil? If so, what must truth be, for it to be capable of being taught in this way? And what, then, are a teacher and a pupil?

These are the questions Plato raises, and Kierkegaard recalls here the main conclusions.

Everything begins from a paradox: It is equally impossible for a person to seek what he knows and to seek what he does not know. In the first case it would be pointless; in the second, he would not even know what to look for. The conclusion seems to be that it is not possible either to discover truth or to teach it.

To overcome this difficulty, Socrates proposes the following solution. He leads a young slave to discover a mathematical truth (how to construct a square whose area is twice that of a square with side 2), to the astonishment of the audience—and of the slave himself. Guided by Socrates’ questions and hints, the slave finds the truth. This is what is known as Socratic maieutics: the art of ‘midwifery’, drawing from a mind a truth it carries within itself without knowing it.

From this, Socrates infers that every human being knows truth—carries it within himself—without any distinction of social rank, as the slave’s case shows. Yet learning a truth is impossible, because of the paradox stated above. One must therefore conclude that a person knows truth without having learnt it. How is that possible?

Socrates replies with the theory of recollection: the person ‘remembers’ the truth, which has always been within him, even before birth. For the soul existed prior to its incarnation in this body, and at that time it knew all truths. We can recover them through remembrance—recollection—of that earlier state.

This is how Socrates, then, resolves the difficulty involved in teaching truth. And it yields an original conception of the teacher–pupil relation. Contrary to what one might think, the teacher does not reveal truth to the pupil, does not bestow it from above, in a sort of vertical hierarchy.

The teacher merely prompts the pupil to remember—he is only ‘the occasion’ for recollection:

Socrates had enough courage and prudence not only to be sufficient to himself, but to be, for others, only the occasion.

The teacher thus becomes something accidental—secondary, inessential—in the question of truth: The truth in which I rest was within me, and it was through myself that it came to light; and even Socrates was no more capable of giving it to me than a coachman is capable of dragging his horse’s load—though he can help it along with the whip.

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