In this essay, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, comparing Socratic and Christian notions of truth, faith, the historical, and the eternal. He asks, “Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin. It was a Socratic question or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight.” Kierkegaard continues by stating Socrates’ notion of the individual and how its subjectivity relates to the objective world. “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge. Moreover, this is how Socrates understood himself, and in his view this is how every human being must understand himself, and by virtue of that understanding he must understand his relation to the single individual, always with equal humility and with equal pride.” Socrates was opposed to notions of individuality espoused by the Skeptics and by arch-subjectivists, “If the Socratic theory of recollection and of every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in “to learn” not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, with everything as the measure of man, in the sense that he is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that the single individual is for himself the measure, no more and no less.”
Kierkegaard next compares the Socratic method to the teachings of Christ. “Between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest…. The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching.” Where Christianity steps beyond the Socratic is in the leap of faith. “Faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical…. The follower, however, is in faith related to that teacher in such a way that he is eternally occupied with his historical existence…. Then the object of faith becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has the condition, can thrust the teacher away…. Faith, then, must cling firmly to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment…. The contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and, since it is a condition for the understanding of eternal truth, it is eo ipso the eternal condition…. Faith is not an act of will…. But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so…. Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith…. The wonder that the eternal condition is given in time.”
Kierkegaard concludes, “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (for it is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which in this connection one can say with multiple meanings that it did not arise from any human heart…. If in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy we begin by narrating what was said earlier, how shall we ever, not finish, but ever manage to begin, for history just keeps on growing.”
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