This 1841 work by Kierkegaard was the dissertation for his college degree. It deals with the irony espoused by Socrates, as he was portrayed by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes. Kierkegaard begins by defining the ironic questioning style ubiquitous with Socrates. “One can ask with the intention of receiving an answer containing the desired fullness, and hence the more one asks, the deeper and more significant becomes the answer; or one can ask without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent content by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind. The first method presupposes, of course, that there is a plenitude; the second that there is an emptiness. The first is the speculative method; the second the ironic. Socrates in particular practiced the latter method…. Socrates’ questioning was essentially aimed at the knowing subject for the purpose of showing that when all was said and done they knew nothing whatever.” Kierkegaard is careful to separate, as best he can, the views of Socrates from those of the author who puts words into his mouth. “Just as Socrates’ philosophy began with the presupposition that he knew nothing, so it ended with the presupposition that human beings know nothing at all; Platonic philosophy began in the immediate unity of thought and being and stayed there. The direction that manifested itself in idealism as reflection upon reflection manifested itself in Socrates’ questioning. To ask questions—that is, the abstract relation between the subjective and the objective—ultimately became the primary issue for him.”
Kierkegaard furthers dissects Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates by analyzing the interplay of irony and the dialectic. “That irony and dialectic are the two great forces in Plato everyone will surely admit, but that there is a double kind of irony and a double kind of dialectic cannot be denied, either. There is an irony that is only a stimulus for thought, that quickens it when it becomes drowsy, disciplines it when it becomes dissolute. There is an irony that is itself the activator and in turn is itself the terminus striven for. There is a dialectic that in perpetual movement continually sees to it that the question does not become entrapped in an incidental understanding, that is never weary and is always prepared to set the issue afloat if it runs aground—in short, that always knows how to keep the issue in suspension and precisely therein and thereby wants to resolve it. There is a dialectic that, in proceeding from the most abstract ideas, wants to let these display themselves in more concrete qualifications, a dialectic that wants to construct actuality with the idea.” Kierkegaard continues on with the purpose of irony. “Because irony cuts the bonds that restrain speculation, helps to shove off from the purely empirical sandbanks and to venture out upon the ocean, this is a negatively liberating activity. Irony is in no sense a partner in the expedition. But insofar as the speculating individual feels liberated and an abundance spreads out before his observing eyes, he may readily believe that he also owes all this to irony and his gratitude may wish to owe it everything…. Thus a personality is a necessary point of departure in the positions of both irony and subjective thinking; the activity of this personality becomes liberating in both of these positions, but the position of irony is negative, whereas that of reasoning is positive.”
Kierkegaard returns to the role of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. “If Plato’s view of Socrates were to be expressed in a few words, it could be said that he provides him with the idea. Where the empirical ends, Socrates begins; his function is to lead speculation out of finite qualifications, to lose sight of finitude and steer out upon Oceanus where ideal striving and ideal infinity recognize no alien considerations but are themselves their infinite goal. Thus, just as lower sense perception turns pale before this higher knowledge—indeed, becomes a delusion, a deception by comparison—just so every consideration of a finite goal becomes a disparagement, a profanation of the holy. In short, Socrates has gained ideality, has conquered those vast regions that hitherto were a terra incognita [unknown land]. For this reason, he disdains the useful, is indifferent to the established [Bestaaaende], is an out-and-out enemy of the mediocrity that in empiricism is the highest, an object of pious worship, but for speculation a troll changeling.”
Kierkegaard makes the convincing case that Socrates’ views were indeed antithetical to the polis. “The negative relation of the daimonian to Socrates… had the express effect of making him relate negatively to actuality or, in the Greek sense, to the state…. It was a polemical relation to the state religion to substitute a silence in which a warning voice was audible only on occasion, a voice that (and this is about the most fundamental polemic) never had a thing to do with the substantial interests of political life, never said a word about them, but only dealt with Socrates’ and at most his friends’ completely private and particular affairs—to substitute this for the Greek life permeated, even in the most insignificant manifestations, by a god-consciousness, to substitute a silence for this divine eloquence echoed in everything.” Hegel comments on this birth of human agency, “In the ‘divine sign’ of Socrates we see the will which formerly had simply transferred itself beyond itself now beginning to apply itself to itself and so to recognize its own inward nature. This is the beginning of a self-knowing and so of a genuine freedom.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates’ position, then, is that of subjectivity, of inwardness, which reflects upon itself and in its relation to itself detaches and volatilizes the established [Bestaaaende] in the flood of thought that surges over it and carries it away while it itself recedes again into thought. Replacing the grace to be ashamed, which powerfully but mysteriously kept the individual tied to the lead string of the state, there now came the decisiveness and self-assurance of subjectivity.”
Another aspect of Socrates’ philosophy that Kierkegaard focusses on is the supremacy of ignorance. Socrates “gave up the study of nature for the study of man. To say, therefore, that Socrates did not accept the gods accepted by the state does not mean that he was an atheist. On the contrary, Socrates’ nonacceptance of the national gods was essential to his whole position, which he himself theoretically characterized as ignorance…. His accusers really ought to have charged him precisely with this ignorance, since particularly in the Greek state and to a certain extent in every state there is indeed an ignorance that must be regarded as a crime…. In the philosophic sense… he was ignorant. He was ignorant of the ground of all being, the eternal, the divine—that is, he knew that it was, but he did not know what it was.” Here Kierkegaard turns back to the newly emerging concepts of subjectivity and individuality. “When subjectivity by means of its negative power has broken the spell in which human life lay in the form of substantiality, when it has emancipated man from his relation to God just as it freed him from his relation to the state, then the first form in which this manifests itself is ignorance…. This ignorance is in turn quite consistently called human wisdom, because here man has come into his own right.”
Socrates freed himself from the bounds of Greek society through irony. “The ironic freedom he enjoyed because no relationship was strong enough to bind him and he continually felt himself free above it, the enjoyment of being sufficient unto himself, to which he abandoned himself—all this suggests something aristocratic…. True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed.” The preeminent form of freedom was moral freedom. “Here the moral individual is the negatively free individual. He is free because he is not bound by another, but he is negatively free precisely because he is not limited in another. When the individual by being in his other is in his own, then for the first time he is in truth (i.e., positively) free, affirmatively free. Therefore, moral freedom is arbitrariness; it is possibility of good and evil.” Hegel comments, “The conscience as formal subjectivity is simply to be on the verge of slipping into evil.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates brought this about, but not in the sense of the Sophists, who taught the individual to constrict himself in his own particular interests; he brought the individual to this by universalizing subjectivity, and to that extent he is the founder of morality…. The individual should no longer act out of fear of the law but with a conscious knowledge of why he acted.”
Going back to Socrates’ trial, Kierkegaard repeats why Socrates was anathema to the Athenian polis. “The whole substantial life of Greek culture had lost its validity for him, which means that to him the established actuality was unactual, not in this or that particular aspect but in its totality as such; that with regard to this invalid actuality he let the established order of things appear to remain established and thereby brought about its downfall; that in the process Socrates became lighter and lighter, more and more negatively free.” Kierkegaard concludes by bringing it back to irony. “It cannot really be said that the ironist places himself outside and above morality and ethics, but he lives far too abstractly, far too metaphysically and esthetically to reach the concretion of the moral and the ethical. For him, life is drama, and what absorbs him is the ingenious complication of this drama. He himself is a spectator, even when he is the one acting.”
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