The Logic of the Absurd

Abstract

Since the work of Kierkegaard, philosophers have been called upon to face a topic some may too readily assume has no business in philosophy in the first place: the category of the absurd. Of course, insofar as Kierkegaard can be dismissed as a religious thinker, it is possible simply to suppose that the subject of the absurd has slipped into philosophy, as one might say, while reason's back was turned, and thus holds no legitimate claim on philosophy in particular or rational thought in general. But in Kierkegaard's major philosophical work, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, which he planned to be the consummation and climax of his philosophical activity, I believe an argument can be discerned showing that there is a certain logic to the introduction of the category of the absurd; that the absurd is not introduced for the sake of absurdity alone, but on the basis of some serious reasoning. I would like to be able to construct my own version of that argument, which leads through the Postscript's discussion of truth as subjectivity and serves to demonstrate that its appeal to the absurd is a rigorous and logical move.' In the end, I aim to clarify both the category of the absurd and the meaning of the claim that truth is subjectivity sufficiently to have shown how it is that rather than logic barring the door to the absurd, it was reason itself who first let it in.