Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript
| Date: 14 April 2011, 06:14
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Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard's own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication, the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of Kierkegaard's increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay, together with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.
Summary: a steaming intellectual waffle
Rating: 5
I have had the Hong translation (1992) for years but had difficulties reading it. Comparing it to an older translation in the selections included in Deconstruction In Context, I was glad that Hong used the idea of a spurious infinity. In mathematics, an idea which produces a march down the road to a spurious infinity is considered absurd and easily dismissed. The 2009 translation of Concluding Scientific Postscript by Alastair Hannay goes back to the idea of a bad infinity and explains it with a note on Hegel: In Hegel a bad infinity is one that cannot be accommodated to the dialectic of opposition in which oppositions are cancelled in the true infinity.
The thinking in this book is like philosophers considering themselves more advanced than geometers because the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, which makes it impossible for geometry to consider a triangle with two right angles but the philosophers are setting up a dialectic in which two sides are infinitely long or the line between the two right angles is becoming infinitely small. The idea of a tangeant in calculus is the kind of pure idea that makes Kierkegaard choose Lessing as a thinker in the section on Possible and actual theses of Lessing, as opposed to: "Maybe this infinity of reflection is the bad infinity -- in that case we are soon finished, for the bad infinity is meant to be some despicable something or other that has to be given up the sooner the better." (p. 95).
Bubbles in economics work like a spurious infinity when everybody can see that nobody will be able to keep track of where to send the interest on all the borrowed money when the electricity goes out and the lights are shut off. Shooting for $14 trillion of money that has already been spent is a method that is not all that scrupulous about not understanding a joke.
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