Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Danish: Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler, more accurately translated as Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs) is a major work by Søren Kierkegaard.

It was as alien as it could possibly be to my nature to want to terrify others, and therefore I both sadly and perhaps also a bit proudly found my joy in comforting others and in being gentleness itself to them-hiding the terror in my own interior being.

So my idea was to give my contemporaries (whether or not they themselves would want to understand) a hint in humorous form (in order to achieve a lighter tone) that a much greater pressure was needed-but then no more; I aimed to keep my heavy burden to myself, as my cross.

X1 A541) (1849) (Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 451-452) Eduard Geismar was an early lecturer on the works of Soren Kierkegaard.

Through the discipline of resignation, aiming at an absolute commitment to the highest good, through the discipline of suffering, through the consciousness of guilt, the way leads step by step to a more profound pathos, until by a leap we reach the absolute maximum of subjectivity in the Christian consciousness of sin, with its imperative need for a new departure.

Eduard Geismar, Lectures on the Religious Thought of Soren Kierkegaard, p. 57 Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis 1937Walter Lowrie characterized Kierkegaard's authorship up to Concluding Postscript as first "Away from the Aesthetical" and then the works ascribed to Johannes Climacus as "Away from Speculation".

This combination of gross objectivism and bottomless subjectivism represents a synthesis of logically irreconcilable, contradictory principles of thought, which is equally unfortunate from the point of view of philosophical consistency and from that ethical and cultural value.

Apart from this last sceptical stage, it must be said that modern spiritual evolution has been taking unambiguously the line of a more or less materialistic objectivism.

An objectivist understanding of truth expresses itself, therefore, not merely in terms of practical materialism, but also in a general quantification of all life, as it may be seen in the craving for records in sport, in pride in the growth of cities of millions of inhabitants, in respect for the multi-millionaire, in admiration for great political power.

[2]Herbert Read summarised Kierkegaard's book in his 1947 text, The Coat of Many Colors: The Unscientific Postscript is but one more voluminous commentary on the main theme of all Kierkegaard’s work, the dilemma which he represented by the phrase “either-or”: either aesthetic immediacy, which includes not only the eudaemonistic search for pleasure, but also despair (the “sickness unto death”) and religious or metaphysical self-explanation; or the ethical along with the religion of immanence and immediacy and (as its culmination) Christianity apprehended as a paradox.

The Coat of Many Colors by Herbert Read p. 253 The question as to whether Kierkegaard was an existentialist was brought up by Libuse Lukas Miller.

The Christian and the World of Unbelief 1957 by Libuse Lukas Miller p. 78In 1962 Jean T Wilde edited The Search For Being and included an excerpt from Kierkegaard's Concluding Postscript concerning Gotthold Lessing.

Wilde says, "In the Concluding Postscript the question of "the objective problem concerning the truth of Christianity" is dealt with in the first part.

Certainly Tillich, who is often critical of Hegel, nearly always speaks in praise of Kierkegaard, and he gives such an important place in his own thinking to the category of existence that he seems at times to be travelling in the Danish thinker's footsteps.

The System and the Gospel A Critique Of Paul Tillich by Kenneth Hamilton 1963 MacMillan Press p. 37Anoop Gupta (b.