Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Merold Westphal

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Although my writing project continues to keep me, by and large, on a reading hiatus, limiting the bulk of my reading activity to re-reading, I did manage to study this concise, enlightening, dense work. The Postscript, written by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus, became something of a bible for 20th century existentialists — despite the fact that many of them were atheists or agnostics, while Kierkegaard was anything but, and despite the fact that their efforts largely wrested with man’s predicament after the Nietzschian “death of God”, while the Postscript is an in depth examination of the self as a paradoxical synthesis of the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal.

Westphal’s reading here is deep and engaging, and in addition to engaging with the long and often complex text itself, he also situates it within the larger social and philosophical context in which it appeared. In doing so, he connects Kierkegaard’s thoughts to a vast range of Western thinking, stretching back in time to Socrates (and in particular Climacus’s rendering of the “historical” Socrates as the exemplar of authenticity qua uncertainty) through late twentieth century postmodernism.