A work that affords an indirect yet useful glimpse of Kierkegaard's view of Hegel is his unpublished The Book on Adler (also translated under the title On Authority and Revelation). Kierkegaard started work on it in May of 1846, only a few months after the Concluding Unscientific Postscript appeared and the authorship was to come to an end. It was revised off and on over the next several years. The main discussion of the work concerns the purported revelation of the Danish priest, Adolph Peter Adler. Prior to his revelation, Adler was a convinced Hegelian, and Kierkegaard argues that Adler's confused state of mind is, at least in part, a result of a Hegelian influence. Thus, in this work Kierkegaard discusses Hegel and Hegelianism indirectly in a number of places. These passages must be examined in order to sketch a general picture of Kierkegaard's assessment of Hegel during this period immediately after the Postscript. Moreover, there are reasons to believe that Kierkegaard's picture of Hegel's philosophy might have been in large measure derived from Adler's expositions of it. Thus, Kierkegaard's relation to Adler is doubly important for the purposes of this investigation.

Kierkegaard had previously criticized Adler in The Concept of Anxiety. As was seen previously, the main work under scrutiny there was Adler's Popular Lectures on Hegel's Objective Logic. Although Adler is never mentioned directly in the work, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis criticize Adler's use of Christian doctrines in his explication of Hegel's logic.