Alphabet

Kierkegaard that was inspired by Lessing’s thesis, would defer the compliment that he is a Christian in favour of saying that he is ‘trying to become’ one. Derrida would add that in trying to become a Christian, or anything else, Kierkegaard doesn’t truly know what he is trying to become.

We don’t know what we desire and that is the condition under which a more radical desire is possible, so that for Derrida we are all, Augustine and Kierkegaard and everyone else alike, afloat or adrift in the same boat, a boat whose final destination neither Hegel nor anyone else knows.

Postmoderns strongly doubt, after the genocides of the twentieth century that history is the unfolding of God’s life on earth [Hegel].
Philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida think that history is something of a roll of the dice, that nothing is guaranteed, that truth might remain for ever concealed, and things might turn out badly.

Hegel set off a torrent of anti-philosophy, in which philosophers philosophize against Hegel and the tremendous reach that philosophy had grasped for in Hegel. His successors react against him in different ways – by being more materialistic than idealistic (Marx), more interested in the existential individual than in world history (Kierkegaard), and more atheistic than panentheistic (Nietzsche). They all proposed different candidates for what is truly concrete, but they didn’t dispute that concrete is what truth is and must be.

Caputo J.D. (2013) Truth, Philosophy in Transit, p. 152,155