In the last resort there is no theory

“In the last resort there is no theory” expresses a priority rather than a simple rejection of thought: a person’s fundamental practical and ethical decision comes before, and grounds, the theoretical account that person can give of it. The book presents the formula as Søren Kierkegaard’s concise statement of a commitment that also complicates his familiar opposition to Hegelian system-building.

Kierkegaard’s Formula

The phrase appears in a discussion of meaningless sacrifice and infinite resignation. The book identifies Søren Kierkegaard as the theologian who most fully articulated the logic of sacrifice without an assured purpose or compensating result. It then attributes to him the admission that, at the ultimate point, theory cannot supply the ground of the decision. This is not offered as a psychological explanation for sacrifice; the emphasis falls on the decision’s negative, ungrounded character.

The expression condenses the claim that authentic human existence rests on a concrete practico-ethical engagement or choice that precedes every theoretical account of itself. Such a choice is contingent in the radical sense that it cannot be deduced from a complete system. Theory may describe or interpret a commitment, but it cannot replace the act of committing oneself or furnish an ultimate theoretical guarantee for it.

Choice Before System

The book places Kierkegaard’s position within a wider current of anti-philosophy, alongside Nietzsche and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this account, the decisive core of being human lies in practical engagement and choice, not in a theory that could fully master or justify them. The formula therefore marks a limit on theoretical explanation while giving decision a constitutive role: a person’s chosen way of life is not merely an application of prior knowledge but a commitment on which theoretical orientation itself depends.

The argument reaches back into German Idealism rather than simply rejecting it. The book says that Kant’s priority of practical over theoretical reason laid a foundation for anti-philosophy. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, discussing the choice between Spinozism and the philosophy of subjective freedom, likewise makes philosophical allegiance depend on the kind of person making the choice. On this reading, the formula brings Søren Kierkegaard into an unexpected continuity with Kant and Fichte: beneath their differences, a practical decision precedes the theory that would explain it.

An Ambiguous Opposition to Hegel

The phrase also clarifies why Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism is more ambiguous than a straightforward rejection of systematic thought suggests. Kierkegaard casts Hegel as the ultimate systematizer, subordinating living subjectivity to the logical development of the universal Notion. Yet the book argues that setting Hegel up as an absolute enemy can obscure a disavowed proximity: Kierkegaard’s insistence on the irreducibility of decision does not erase the philosophical problem of how a subject relates to a system.

That problem resonates with the book’s account of the passage from Kant to Hegel. Hegel’s move, as described there, is not to overcome the division between opposites by discovering a higher reconciliation, but to affirm the division itself; the apparent obstacle becomes a condition internal to reality. This context sharpens the expression’s force. It does not promise that theory can finally reconcile every opposition, nor does it offer a new theory in place of the old one. It insists that theoretical explanation has a limit, and that a practical decision cannot be dissolved into the system that seeks to account for it.

Significance

The expression serves as a compact statement of the book’s account of commitment: theory does not stand outside life as its final judge, because a prior practical choice helps determine what kind of theory a person adopts. In the discussion of Kierkegaard, that choice is linked to meaningless sacrifice and infinite resignation; in the wider philosophical argument, it connects practical reason, subjective freedom, and the resistance of living subjectivity to complete systematization. The phrase’s force lies in holding those claims together without pretending that theory can provide the final ground it names as absent.