Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 2 vols. - book reviews

Christian Century, April 14, 1993 by Lloyd Steffen

Having agreed to pay a printer to transmute his pen scratches into printed prose, Soren Kierkegaard recorded that he delivered - "lock, stock, and barrel" - the manuscript of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to his Copenhagen published in December 1845. Within two months not only had the type of this 600-page text been hand-set, but two sets of page proofs had been printed and returned. By February 1846, showing no signs of the enormous effort - either on the part of the printer or the author - the book was resting comfortably on bookstore shelves.

The two-month publication history of this book is only one of several curious, even uncanny events surrounding the appearance of a work destined to become a classic of modern thought. In the two-year period prior to publication, while taking the Postscript through a provisional, a second, then a final draft, Kierkegaard had been writing and publishing at least six other works. The writing was secreted away, for Kierkegaard's concept of irony required that he maintain high visibility as a Copenhagen peripatetic (Andrew Hamilton: "The fact is he walks about town all day ...") while also availing himself of opportunities to take regular excursions to the Danish countryside and make an occasional jaunt abroad.

Kierkegaard's literary productivity during these months was prodigious, yet his books failed to find an audience. The Postscript appeared inauspiciously and created no excitement. It was reviewed neither widely nor warmly. Kierkegaard noted that "a certain scholarly clique spread the opinion that it was a rather slapdash work." Three years after publication, "perhaps 50 copies were sold." In a mood of resignation, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: "It makes no difference ... [It is a book that] by its content, its artistic structure, its dialectical consistency, has a significant future."

That future is being secured in part by the appearance of this volume in the Princeton University Press project, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to retranslate and edit all of Kierkegaard's writings. Howard and Edna Hong have carefully worked on this two-volume set. The first volume contains the text of the Postscript, a writing in which pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus characterized the subjective thinker's relation to Christianity. The second volume is a compendium that includes an essay on the Postscript's historical background; a reproduction of the title page from the first printing of the book; relevant references to the book extracted from Kierkegaard's letters and papers, with textual emendations and erasures, and commentary on Climacus; plus a hundred pages of endnotes. No previous English edition of the Postscript has been so thoroughly or thoughtfully edited.

The second volume provides a wealth of information to lay and scholarly readers. The question for the reader, of course, is what role those notes should be allowed to play. For if the Postscript is the humorous work its author claims it to be, then too much preoccupation with scholarly accouterments might spoil the effect.

Kierkegaard meant to stop with this book, hence the idea of "concluding." But, as with so many of his plans, he failed to carry out his own intention owing to circumstance. Instead, the book came to represent a midpoint in his pseudonymous authorship, and the volume continued to provoke its author to express his vocation as a poet-dialectician. The Postscript is deeply dialectical, to the point of spoofing Hegel; and, religiously considered, that dialectic shows itself in that every jab at Christianity is countered by a parry in its defense.

Kierkegaard himself continues to provide an opportunity for intellectual feeding, if not companionship. Whereas Kierkegaard was once claimed by the existentialists, he is now claimed by the deconstructionists. Whether he presaged Derrida or simply poeticized Kant, as another contemporary strain of interpretation would have it, is not clear. The attempt to expose Kierkegaard for what he was - and what was that? - continues unabated.

All the contemporary efforts to eke out Kierkegaard's intellectual allegiances are very interesting. But Kierkegaard resists easy insertion into philosophical positions, whether of his day or ours. He continues to confront and confound us through two perspectives quite out of fashion today, which are best extracted as a deliberate oxymoron: he is an existential teleologist.

But classification is not the issue and never was. Kierkegaard made an enduring if often-overlooked contribution to philosophy by devising a poeticized method of relational analysis, and clearly his deepest concern was the problem of self-deception. To the extent that the Postscript demonstrates that method and has something to say to us about our own tendencies to self-deception, the Postscript is worth reading. And who knows? If the reader of this new edition can stick with the first volume before consulting the second, something important may be produced besides understanding - a laugh. If that happens, all kinds of possibilities may open up.