Philosophical Fragments

Overview

Philosophical Fragments is a hundred and ten pages, published in 1844 under the name Johannes Climacus, and it is the most tightly argued thing Kierkegaard wrote. Where Fear and Trembling circles its subject in prose that is sometimes close to poetry, this book proceeds by strict alternatives, and reads more like a piece of analytic philosophy than anything else in his output.

The pseudonym matters. Johannes Climacus is named for a seventh-century monk who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent, and Kierkegaard uses him for the books that reason about Christianity from outside it. Climacus says plainly that he is not a Christian. He is a man with a thought experiment, and he is scrupulous about not smuggling in a conclusion.

The other thing that shapes the book is that Christianity is never named. Kierkegaard constructs an alternative to Socratic epistemology, follows it wherever it leads, and produces something that turns out to look exactly like the Incarnation, the new birth, the apostles and the church, all under invented terminology: the god, the teacher, the moment, the disciple at second hand. The effect is to make a doctrine most of his readers had absorbed since childhood arrive as if for the first time, and it is the most effective thing in the book.

The title is a joke at Hegel’s expense. Everyone else was writing systems; this is fragments, and the last page offers to sell the reader an appendix.

The argument

The question. Climacus begins from the Meno. Socrates asks how you can look for something you do not know, since you would not recognise it if you found it, and answers with recollection: the soul has always had the truth and learning is being reminded. This has a consequence Kierkegaard fastens on. If the truth is already in you, then the teacher is only an occasion, the particular person who prompts you is accidental, and the moment of learning has no lasting significance. Socrates himself drew this conclusion, which is why he called himself a midwife and refused to be anyone’s master.

Now, says Climacus, suppose the opposite. Suppose the learner does not have the truth, and is not merely ignorant but in a state that makes receiving it impossible. Then the teacher must bring the truth and also the condition for understanding it, which means the teacher is not a teacher at all in the Socratic sense but something closer to a saviour. The learner’s state has to be renamed as well, and Climacus supplies the word: untruth, and by the learner’s own fault. The change in the learner is not learning but a new birth. And the moment when it happens, far from being incidental, becomes the fullness of time.

Who could do this? Chapter 2 asks what such a teacher would have to be, and answers in a parable about a king who loves a humble girl. He cannot raise her to his level, because then she would be overwhelmed and could never be sure she was loved rather than dazzled. He cannot appear to her in disguise, because a deception is not love. The only way is to become what she is, genuinely and not as a costume. Climacus draws the conclusion coldly: the god would have to appear as the lowest, as a servant, and this would not be a display but the truth about him.

The absolute paradox. Chapter 3 is the philosophical heart. The understanding, Climacus says, has a passion for what it cannot think, and keeps pressing against its own limit. The absolute paradox is the eternal becoming temporal, the god becoming an individual human being, which the understanding cannot think and cannot let alone.

When the understanding meets it, there are exactly two outcomes. Offence, in which the understanding asserts itself and rejects the paradox, or faith, which is not an achievement of the understanding at all but a condition given by the paradox itself. There is no third way, and in particular there is no mediation, which is a direct shot at Hegel.

Does being there help? Chapters 4 and 5 ask whether a contemporary has any advantage over someone born eighteen centuries later. Climacus argues no. A contemporary saw a man, and seeing a man is not seeing the god; the paradox is not something the eye can detect. Faith is therefore not a conclusion from evidence, and no quantity of historical research produces it. Hence the striking claim that if the contemporary generation had left nothing behind except the bare statement that the god had appeared in human form, that would be more than enough. The disciple at second hand is in exactly the same position as the first.

How to read it

Read the Meno first, or at least the recollection passage. The whole book is a response to it and the alternatives will not land without it.

Read chapter 1 twice and make sure you can state both options in your own words before going on. Everything after it is consequence.

Keep the pseudonym in view. Climacus is a character, he says he is not a Christian, and he presents the whole construction as a hypothesis. Whether Kierkegaard is arguing for it, or demonstrating what would have to be true for it to be believed, is deliberately left open.

Notice that Christianity is never named, and notice what that does to you as you recognise each piece. The technique is the argument.

Read the Concluding Unscientific Postscript afterwards if you want more. It is by the same pseudonym, it is six times as long, and Kierkegaard describes it as a postscript to this book.

The common misreading is that the leap of faith means believing without reasons because reasons have run out. Climacus is making a stronger and stranger claim: that in this one case the understanding runs into something it cannot think, and that faith is not a substitute for knowledge but a different relation to the truth, given rather than achieved.

Questions it raises

• Is the Socratic option genuinely exhausted? Climacus presents two alternatives as the only two. Is there a third?
• If faith is given by the paradox rather than reached by the learner, in what sense is the learner responsible for lacking it?
• The claim is that a contemporary had no advantage. Does that free faith from history, or make the historical claim irrelevant in a way that undermines it?
• Climacus says the understanding wants its own downfall. Is that a real feature of thinking, or a description of one temperament?
• Christianity is never named. Does the disguise clarify the argument or rig it?
• If offence and faith are the only two responses, what is Climacus, who says he is neither?