The pseudonymous author of the Philosophical Crumbs and its Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus, describes himself as a "humorist". This chapter discusses his account of the roles for irony and humor as confinia, or boundaries, between the aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence-spheres. Irony and humor serve as "incognitos" for ethical and religious existence and play significant roles in ethical and religious development. The Postscript contains the most famous Søren Kierkegaardian satire, ostensibly at the expense of Hegelianism. The chapter considers how Climacus' ostensibly anti-Hegelian satire might rebound on his readers, and aspects of the "way out" central to the "legitimacy" of the comic. For Christianity, the "way out" would ultimately have to be eschatological. That belief, for the Christian, is indeed eschatological: faith in a God who "will prevail in the end", such that the essential suffering of life need not be experienced as utterly overwhelming.

This chapter talks about important roles of two historical figures, Socrates and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in Johannes Climacus' Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs. The clues about the roles of Lessing and Socrates in Postscript are furnished by the nature and structure of the book as a whole. Climacus' discussion of Lessing helps one to see that it is neither possible nor desirable for another to know the religious life of a subjective existing thinker. Climacus' characterization of Socrates' passionate faithfulness in existence that sets the stage for his transition to what it means to exist in Christian faith. Climacus arguably evinces the full extent of his kinship with Lessing and Socrates in employing a mode of communication that arouses and intensifies the passion of thought. The great question with which Postscript leaves us is whether this intellectual passion is transferable to the tasks of existence.

This chapter suggests that the book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, contains both a quasi-sequel to Philosophical Crumbs and a postscript to Crumbs that provided a new and crucial supplement to Crumbs. Although some aspects of Crumbs become more finely grained in the part of the Postscript that is a "sequel", the point of the "postscript" part of the Postscript was to provide something new. The chapter also suggests that whereas in Crumbs Socratic subjectivity was presented as an alternative to the non-Socratic (Christian) position, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript reveals them in a positive relation. The "postscript" raises the question of how to think of a "deepening" of human subjectivity that is not an "evolution". The difficulty is to think such a sharpening (intensification, deepening) of pathos, one in which pathos is preserved and transfigured, without eliminating the qualitativeness of the transition.

This chapter presents an overview of Johannes Climacus' two works and the two therapeutic, experimental stances he adopts in relation to his readers. Climacus' first book, Philosophical Crumbs, is a rather slender volume that hypothetically investigates the difference between a Socratic conception of the individual's relation to the truth and a Christian conception. His second book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is a kind of sequel to Philosophical Crumbs in the form of a postscript. The chapter also presents a brief examination of Søren Kierkegaard's unfinished manuscript Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est; and a more detailed account of Climacus' diagnosis of what he thinks has gone wrong in Christendom and how this relates to his decision to become an author. So while Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms may be one means of engaging in indirect communication, there are presumably other means of indirection that are available to the pseudonymous authors themselves.