Kierkegaard’s Socrates as Comic and Tragic Figure

Andrew Burgess, Department of Philosophy
The University of New Mexico, USA
ABSTRACT. Socrates appears throughout Kierkegaard’s pages, always drawing attention from scholars. In this paper I draw upon two Kierkegaardian categories to portray his Socrates as, first, comic (Concept of Irony, Aristophanes’ “The Clouds”; Philosophical Fragments), and later as a “unity of the comic and the tragic” (Stages on Life’s Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Plato’s Symposium 223 cd). Then is the Socrates as “truth-martyr” in Kierkegaard’s late writings merely a tragic figure? No, the story of Socrates there is not just tragedy but “divine comedy,” in which the comic and the tragic are reunited at a deeper level than before.

From his dissertation all the way to his last reflections, the thinker to whom Kierkegaard refers most often, and whom he admires most, is Socrates. “Reading about him has made my heart beat as violently as did the young man’s heart when he conversed with him,” Kierkegaard writes in 1847; “the thought of him has been the inspiration of my youth and has filled my soul; my longing for conversation with him has been entirely different from the longing for conversation with anyone with whom I have ever spoken.” Scholars have accordingly not been lacking to investigate the relationship between Kierkegaard and Socrates, beginning with the classic study by Jens Himmelstrup and up to the present day. For the most part, however, these studies have focused either upon Kierkegaard’s dissertation about Socratic irony or else upon the Socrates figure in the two works by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, making it difficult to appreciate Socrates’ role in Kierkegaard’s work as a whole. In this paper, therefore, I propose to orient the picture of Socrates from just two key Kierkegaardian concepts, the comic and the tragic. I shall (1) begin with Socrates’ as comic figure in Kierkegaard’s dissertation, (2) take up the notion of the “unity of the comic and the tragic” in the middle period, and then (3) focus especially on Socrates’ role in the late writings, before (4) evaluating the overall place of Socrates in Kierkegaard’s writings. My special concern is to bring out Socrates’ role within Kierkegaard’s late writings, beginning in 1846, both because they have been largely overlooked on this topic and because they represent Kierkegaard’s mature reflections about Socrates.
Socrates as Comic Figure in The Concept of Irony and Philosophical Fragments
Both Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), and his pseudonymous Philosophical Fragments three years later, are puzzling in the extreme, but in different ways. The dissertation is by far Kierkegaard’s most extensive treatment of Socrates, and, since irony is for Kierkegaard one of the two forms of the comic, also of Socrates as comic figure. Unfortunately, however, the dissertation seems so wrong headed as to make many scholars think that this book about irony cannot possibly mean just what it says but must be itself in large part ironic. Plainly such a dissertation needs to be approached with caution. I shall, therefore, begin with a discussion of Kierkegaard’s definition of irony; and that discussion, in turn, will call for a wider look of the nature of the comic, of which irony is a part, and of the comic’s correlative concept, the tragic. Only then will it be safe to take up the book itself and to compare it with Philosophical Fragments.
The most helpful definition of the comic and the tragic in Kierkegaard’s authorship occurs in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), in the following terms: “The difference between the comic and the tragic consists in the relation of the contradiction to the idea. The comic interpretation produces the contradiction or allows it to become apparent by having in mente [in mind] the way out; therefore the contradiction is painless. The tragic interpretation sees the contradiction and despairs over the way out.” That is to say, in terms stripped of Hegelian-sounding vocabulary, both a comic and a tragic interpretation of a situation depend upon seeing an incongruity (“contradiction”) between the way things might be and perhaps ought to be (the “idea”) and the way they are. The difference is that, with the comic, a person imagines oneself detached from the situation, while with the tragic one does not. The person who sees the situation as comic finds only the other person ridiculous, not oneself; but anyone who sees it as tragic admits that the other person is much like oneself and feels the other person’s embarrassment or shame as if it were one’s own.
Socratic irony, as Kierkegaard presents it in his dissertation, is a paradigm case of the comic, as Postscript defines that concept. The contradiction Socrates’ exhibits through his way of teaching is between his own moral teaching and the conventional views of the Greek city state of his time. From this contradiction Socrates finds himself completely detached; he is, in the words Kierkegaard applies to him, “negatively free. “He did not contract a deeper relation with others, those whom he lifted out of their natural position (he was not a partisan), but at the same time he was ironically beyond them.” In his irony Socrates “stood ironically above every relationship . . . His relationship with the single individual was only momentary, and he himself was suspended high above all this in ironic contentment. . . . no relationship was strong enough to bind him . . . all this suggests something aristocratic.” He simply provoked the old order in Greece to self-destruct and then watched with an amused smile as it fell apart.
But is this comic figure truly Socrates? Such a Socrates is certainly not what one would expect just by reading Plato’s dialogues, but that is because, Kierkegaard argues in the first half of his dissertation, Plato’s dialogues do not present Socrates as he really was. The historical Socrates was instead someone much more like the Socrates in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds than what one would expect from Plato. In that play Aristophanes portrays Socrates as suspended in a basket suspended from the ceiling. The Clouds brings out this situation masterfully. Suddenly, at one point in the play, a student and the main character, Strepsiades, see a basket in the sky, and Strepsiades calls out, “Hallo! who’s that? that fellow in the basket?” The student replies: “That’s HE”; and when Strepsiades asks “Who’s HE? the student says “Socrates.” When they call out to Socrates to ask him what he is doing, he replies condescendingly to these mere mortals: “I walk on air, and contem-plate the Sun.” What a perfect metaphor both for Socrates’ detachment from others and his feeling of superiority to them! Socrates is here the supremely comic figure, and it takes Aristophanes, the supreme comic dramatist of the ancient world, to point this out.
One reason for this puzzling--many might say, perverse--reading of the figure of Socrates is that Kierkegaard is writing a dissertation in the field of philosophy, and for him the concept of philosophy typically connotes speculation, in the general manner of Hegel’s Danish followers during that time, such as J. L. He’d. To “speculate” means, literally, to look out upon; and, following that definition, speculative philosophy would be, in some way, a philosophy that looks upon the world as a whole, just as Aristophanes’ Socrates looks out upon the Athenians below. Whereas for Hegel, comedy was merely the final stage of the development of the arts, for J. L. He’d the “speculative comedy” became not only the supreme art but even the appropriate vehicle for philosophy itself. This does not mean that, either for Hegel or for He’d, comedy is itself philosophy, since comedy occupies itself with the accidental and the concrete, and for them philosophy strives to achieve the necessary and the universal. Nonetheless, the kind of detachment the comic cultivates is precisely the attitude toward the incongruities of the world that philosophy promotes, although in a far more comprehensive way than comedy can ever achieve.
Kierkegaard’s next major treatment of Socratic irony comes in Philosophical Fragments, written under the pseudonym “Johannes Climacus.” Here, instead of adopting the viewpoint of Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Kierkegaard builds almost entirely from Plato’s dialogue Meno 81cd. Unlike the Socrates of the dissertation, Climacus’ Socrates seems here to be supremely modest rather than supremely aristocratic. He is a teacher, but he has no teachings to provide and does not claim to have any. The pupil already has all the teachings within and merely needs to be reminded of them. Yet, in a sense, this situation, too, is irony, since the teacher is fully detached from the situation of the pupil. The detachment is in fact two-sided; not only must the teacher remain fully detached from the pupil, but also the pupil from the teacher. Yet perhaps one ought not use the term “detachment” here, since the teacher has become so detached from the pupil as to become a mere abstraction; it is as if the teacher is not a person named “Socrates” but the Socratic principle by itself. Thus, while it is true that the Socrates (or Socratic principle) in Fragments does not smile condescendingly on his pupil, that does not mean that he is modest; he does not smile graciously either. The reason there is no smile mentioned in the text is that there is no person here to smile, only an abstraction, and there can be no smile without a person--unless, of course, one is a Cheshire cat.
The dissertation and Fragments differ substantially on some points. A major apparent divergence lies in the nature of the incongruities (“contradictions”) the irony of each book is supposed to expose. In the dissertation these incongruities are between a person’s actions and the “idea” one purports to uphold. That is how irony manages to expose a hypocrite, for example. In Fragments, on the other hand, the incongruity seems at first to be simply between what one knows and what one does not. As the argument of Fragments progresses, however, the difference with the dissertation on this point become less and less significant, because the distinctive kind of “knowledge” and “error” in this later book turns out to be one of action as well.
Thus, in the end, in both the dissertation and in Fragments, Socrates’ ironical stance marks him as an essentially comic figure. Indeed, that is just what makes him a speculative philosopher. Emotionally detached, in the dissertation, from the cultural world around him, and in Fragments, from the pupil who comes to him for teaching, and even from the world of actuality, such a Socrates remains like Aristophanes’ character the eternal observer, aloof from all the surveys.
The Unity of the Comic and the Tragic
When Kierkegaard next takes up the figure of Socrates as a principal focus, it is not in terms of the comic by itself, nor the tragic either, but a much more complex concept than before--the unity of the comic and the tragic--in the two large volumes near the middle of his writing, Stages on Life’s Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. With the aid of this concept Kierkegaard is able to create a much fuller portrayal of Socrates than he could before.
Instead of the scene of Socrates in a basket, from Aristophanes’ comedy, Kierkegaard now draws from Plato’s dialogue Symposium. The textual basis for this next conception is small, almost trivial, but the implications the book Stages on Life’s Way finds are enormous. At the end of Plato’s Symposium 223d, as most of the participants in the dialogue lie scattered about the room half-drunk and half-asleep, the narrator reports that Socrates “was trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skilled tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet.” What arguments Socrates might possibly have offered for such a view, the narrator, half-asleep himself, does not report. For the author of Stages on Life’s Way, however, the answer is clear: the reason the skilled writer of tragedies should be able to write comedies is because, at their best, tragedy and comedy ought to be dealing with the same kind of situation.
What that kind of situation is, Stages illustrates by the famous death scene at the end of the dialogue Phaedo 115b-118a, where Socrates’ followers are “laughing one moment and crying the next.” The standard dramatic view would make this scene into a tragedy: Socrates is a noble martyr brought to a bitter end through an unyielding fate. No, says the author; that cannot be right. Socrates “does not suffer at all, he has already considered how droll it is that such a queer one [atopos ehs] comes to an end by being executed.” Well, then, is this scene more appropriate for a comedy? That approach will not work either, because the way Socrates “himself considered all the comic aspects proves specifically that he is not comic; and if ever there was anyone who was not comic it was Socrates.” Nor is Socrates first comic and then tragic, or first comic and then tragic; instead, in what the book calls the “unity of the comic and the tragic” he is both simultaneously (SLW, 419). No wonder Socrates’ followers were puzzled by him. That they were laughing and crying by turns shows that they did not understand him at all, for whenever the comic and the tragic are unified in this way they have to be simultaneous. Thus what we have here is an example of the notion of the “unity of the comic and the tragic.”
The approach Stages takes, of course, is not the obvious way to interpret the passage from Plato’s Symposium Kierkegaard takes as his main support for his notion. Prima facie Socrates seems in that passage just to be arguing that any good writer of tragedy should also be able to write a good comedy. Stages, however, goes far beyond this modest thesis and argues that, for really complex, interesting dramatic situations a combination of tragedy and comedy is called for. These are the situations of what the book calls “duplexity,” in which internal, not external, forces place an individual in an inextricable position. Such a situation is what the main character, called simply “Quidem” (“someone”) in Stages finds himself; and such is also the situation of Socrates. Socrates was at all times able to “see the intrinsic duplexity ... to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and the highest comedy.”
As in many other respects, Kierkegaard’s second “Climacus” book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, develops and clarifies Fragments, Stages and all the other works that precede it. The communication style of the person who thinks like Socrates, Postscript says, will be a mixture of jest and earnestness, leaving the listeners to find out the truth for themselves. For such a person jest and earnest, comedy and tragedy, are inextricably bound up together. Nonetheless, this thesis does not imply that the jest is any the less comic, or the tragedy any the less full of pathos; on the contrary, the jest deepens the earnestness, and the earnestness the jest.
The conceptual gap between the Fragments and Stages does not mean that Kierkegaard has changed his mind during the year that separated the writing of these two books. On the contrary; the theme of the closeness of the comic to the tragic turns up very early in Kierkegaard’s notebooks and occasionally thereafter. In fact, even the dissertation itself, in one passage, describes the scene of Socrates at the end of the Symposium as representing a kind of “unity of the comic and the tragic,” but there the unity is merely abstract and bears little resemblance to what Kierkegaard understands elsewhere by the unity of the comic and the tragic. Indeed, the more one studies the dissertation, the more one is inclined to find the supposedly “comic” portrayal of Socrates there to be a deliberate caricature. The suspicion that this is the case gets stronger the further one reads. Here is a text whose title claims to be “continual reference” to Socrates, yet in the concluding section Socrates is omitted altogether and he installs a trio of other models (Shakespeare, Goethe, and He’d) in Socrates’ place. That is, moreover, the judgment of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that in the dissertation Kierkegaard “consciously or unconsciously” wants “ to bring out only one side.
According to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in a long footnote, the characterization of the dissertation as a deliberate caricature fits Philosophical Fragments perfectly too. “This may be the proper place,” the footnote in Postscript says, “to elucidate a dubiousness in the design of Fragments . . .
In order, if possible, to elucidate properly the difference between the Socratic (which
was supposed to be the philosophical, the pagan philosophical position) and the category
of the imaginatively constructed thought, which actually goes beyond the Socratic, I
carried the Socratic back to the thesis that all knowing is a recollecting. It is commonly
accepted as such, and only for the person who with a very special interest devotes himself
to the Socratic, always returning to the sources, only for him will it be important to
distinguish between Socrates and Plato on this point. The thesis certainly belongs to both
of them, but Socrates continually parts with it because he wants to exist. By holding
Socrates to the thesis that all knowing is recollecting, one turns him into a speculative
philosopher instead of what he was, an existing thinker who understood existing as the
essential.
The difference of the Socrates in Fragments and that in Postscript is thus in an important respect very much like the difference between the Socrates in the dissertation and that in Stages. Both the dissertation and Fragments present what is in effect mere caricatures of Socrates, making him into a “speculative philosopher” who is detached from any feeling of responsibility for his own existence as a person. Stages and Postscript, on the other hand, present a Socrates who is an “existing thinker,” who “continually parts” from the central thesis of speculative philosophy, recollection, “because he wants to exist.” The reason the portrayals of Socrates in the dissertation and Fragments are caricatures is that they deliberately give the impression that Socrates was merely a speculative philosopher, whereas his speculating, if that is what it should be called, was only a part of his life and not even, for him, the most important part. The Socrates of the dissertation is a philosopher, and nothing but a philosopher; but the Socrates of Postscript is that and something much more: a human being.
The distinction between the two presentations of Socrates also fits with the distinction in Postscript between the comic and the tragic in the definitions with which this essay began. The speculative philosopher is essentially a comic figure, which is why Postscript delights in ridiculing him. Such a thinker sees the incongruities in human life, including his own life, but he knows a “way out,” by confining himself to abstractions and thereby keeping detached from the “pain” that such incongruities could arouse within himself. The Socrates in Postscript, on the other hand--the “subjective existing thinker,” in the sense Postscript uses that phrase--sees those same incongruities in human life, but instead of removing himself from them through a life of abstract theorizing he continually returns from his philosophizing back to the concrete ambiguities of everyday life and thereby remains vulnerable to its pain as well as to its glory.
Socrates after Postscript: A Deeper Unity of the Comic and the Tragic
Although Postscript represents only the midpoint of Kierkegaard’s authorship, it turns out to be the end point for most studies of Socrates’ role in Kierkegaard’s writings. In fact, however, Kierkegaard continued to develop his portrayal of Socrates after writing Postscript, and his later writings reach the culmination of that development, a result that is easy to overlook. The reasons are not hard to find. For one thing, the later works do not center on Socrates in the same way as the dissertation does--which is, after a dissertation on Socrates with “continual reference” to him--or even Fragments, which starts and ends with Socrates. Moreover, the later works not only have religious themes but even carry out these themes in a distinctly religious way, as “upbuilding” and “Christian” discourses, rather than in conventional philosophical argumentation. This latter factor is often the unspoken but decisive factor in the unfortunate neglect of these writings. One of the reasons I was eager to come to this conference was to meet Japanese scholars who might share my interest in these writings. Quite apart from these obvious factors, however, the portrayal of Socrates in the late writings might easily be missed because Kierkegaard deliberately avoids Socrates’ name, substituting instead a phrase such as “a simple wise man of antiquity said.” There may be many reasons why he does this--for example, in order not to make any appeal to Socrates’ authority in works of meditation where appeals to any kind of authority would be out of place. But the result of Kierkegaard’s practice here is that many scholars may not realize that Socrates is even mentioned in these writings, especially Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, and Christian Discourses, in which this characteristic phrase naming Socrates is most common.
The period after Postscript marks an abrupt change in Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socrates’ role. With the writings after Postscript the center of interest switches, from the scene at the end of the Symposium, to Socrates’ defense at his trial in his Apology and to the death scene at the end of the Phaedo. Another notable difference is that, whereas before there had been many scholars who took up the topic of Socrates, after Postscript there are very few. One scholar who has taken up the challenge to trace the development of Kierkegaard’s Socrates portrayal through the late period is the Greek scholar Sophia Scopetea, in a chapter in her book on Kierkegaard and the Greek tradition (1995) and in an essay entitled “Becoming the Flute: Socrates and the Reversal of Values in Kierkegaard’s Late Work,” published the following year.
I shall here lay out briefly her argument and then proceed to relate it to the themes I have been following up, of the comic and the tragic. Scopetea’s main thesis is that Kierkegaard’s views undergo a reversal during the period between the dissertation and the late works. In Fragments, for example, all the emphasis is on Socrates’ message, not his person The teacher is of no importance, because the student already has the teaching and only needs to be reminded of it. In terms of the metaphor Fragments borrows from Apology 27b, Scopetea describes this mode of teaching without a teacher as flute-playing without a flute-player. This early version of Socrates is of one who loves to dance about with his dialectic, teasing, never letting on he may have any serious goal in mind. After Postscript, however, when Kierkegaard suffered public ridicule at the hands of the comic magazine Corsair, his mood changed, and so did his portrayal of Socrates. This later Socrates picture by Kierkegaard focuses on Socrates himself rather than his message, that is, the flute-player rather than the flute. Here Socrates is a martyr, and “persecution is the cardinal criterion that one is advocating the truth” (p. 39). From the teasing dialectician of the dissertation and Fragments, Socrates here emerges in the late writings, according to Scopetea, as a stern martyr, facing trial and death.
Scopetea’s discussion provides an admirable take-off point for an analysis of Socrates in terms of the thesis of the unity of the comic and the tragic, because that thesis brings out how Socrates is not merely stern but also teasing, not merely in earnest but also lightheartedly jesting, thereby combining the comic and the tragic, only in a new, more profound way. That is to say, during this period Socrates continues to exemplify “the unity of the comic and the tragic”--but with the difference, in the late writings, that the notions of the comic and the tragic have deepened from what they were earlier.
I shall begin from a passage in Postscript which, although it does not name Socrates, is especially appropriate to him and seems to be the source of Kierkegaard’s frequent, later description of Socrates, with phrases such as “the simple wise person” of antiquity. To be a “simple” person, as the term is used here, is to keep to that which is basic to humanity, those traits that humanity at its best shares. In this respect Socrates, the “simple wise person” who understands that he does not understand is on the same plane as the “simple person” who just does not understand. Both fail to understand, but they differ in how they fail to understand.
The change of view about Socrates was precipitated by an event in Kierkegaard’s life. Shortly after publishing Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard was attacked by the Corsair journal, and the resulting controversy profoundly affected his way of thinking, including his thinking about Socrates. His confrontation with the Corsair in 1846 convinced him of the power and inherent viciousness of public opinion, and of the journalists and others who manipulated it, and he came to see them as modern sophists, of much the same kind as Socrates had opposed and whose machinations had led to Socrates’ death. Thus only a few months after the Corsair controversy had died down, Kierkegaard wrote, in the first draft of his Book on Adler, he describes how the sophists of his own day, like those of Socrates’ time, mislead the public, and how this “simple wise person’s” kind of irony would deflate their pretentious rhetoric.
In his following book, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits Kierkegaard continues his attack on the mentality of the “crowd,” describing Socrates’ dialectic with the same pair of concepts, jest and earnestness, that he had used in Stages on Life’s Way and in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Socrates, that “simple wise man who by way of jest worked for the good . . . knew what his light-minded people needed lest they directly take in vain the earnestness of the good and thereby be led to pay the wise man much money, a remuneration for their being deceived” he says. Why does Socrates use this combination of jest and earnest? “The character of the jest prevented them from directly taking the earnestness in vain; the adverseness of the jest, on the other hand, made their light-mindedness apparent--this was the judgment. Without this sagacity, the light-minded public probably would have aped him--in being earnest. Now, however, he presented them with a choice, and lo, they chose the jest; they utterly failed to see that there was any earnestness in it--because there was no earnestness in them.” By using jest he kept them from making the good merely a matter of earnestness, but then they did not find any earnestness at all--not because he had not adequately presented both the jest and the earnestness, but because they lacked the earnestness in themselves with which to appreciate the earnestness of Socrates’ message.
Jest and earnestness, earnestness and jest--this is the pair that mark the “unity of the comic and the tragic” in Stages and Postscript. In the three major religious works that follow Postscript, however--Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, and Christian Discourses--the mood has changed, because the stakes are higher, than before. In place of scene at the end of Symposium, where Socrates holds forth to his sleepy, drunken companions on the unity of the comic and the tragic, the dominant scene now is of Socrates defending himself at his trial against malicious charges from the crowd, in his Apology, and also of the last day before his execution, at the end of the Phaedo. With such a fate in prospect, there is no difficulty interpreting Socrates’ situation as a tragedy, presenting the noble and voluntary death of the Western world’s greatest intellectual hero. There he stands, that “noble, wise man of ancient times”--not great as people usually understand it, not a great financier or a powerful politician, but a truth-martyr. “Impoverished, ridiculed, scorned, accused, condemned, he became the noble, simple, wise man of old . . . ”
But comedy? That seems an unlikely genre for a death scene. There is laughter at Socrates, then as before, but Kierkegaard finds such laughter to be out of place at any time. “No,” Kierkegaard says, “ it is not ludicrous, but it is ludicrous, or it is sad that light-minded people laugh at a person--because he is wiser or better than they are--because laughter, too, requires a rational basis, and if that is lacking the laughter is the ludicrous.” Nonetheless, Socrates throughout his life had made of himself--for example, his ugliness--a matter of jest. In all his dialogues, moreover, “he could turn and twist this question in countless ways, but always teasingly, always with that smile on his face that was so characteristic of him when he surmised that the person with whom he was speaking did not himself know definitely what was what.” And this mood Socrates preserved even at the very moment before he accepted the potion of poison, and, Kierkegaard writes, “face-to-face with death he spoke about himself, the condemned one, just as simply as he ever did in the marketplace with a passerby on the most everyday subjects” and “with the cup of poison in his hand he maintained the beautiful festive mood just as simply as he ever did at a banquet.”
Thus the “unity of the comic and the tragic” continues to be the standard for Socrates in Kierkegaard’s last period, as it was before--only that the meaning of the comic and the tragic has changed, become deeper, than before. The tragic has become more earnest, in the face of death, but at the same time, strangely, the comic has become a greater jest. In terms of the definitions of the comic and the tragic Postscript lays out, Socrates sees the “contradictions” in his own situation. He also sees a “way out” of the “pain” by escaping from Athens, as his followers beg him to do, and he teasingly flirts with this possibility--this is the comedy; but he then voluntarily chooses not to take that “way out” and nobly accepts the consequences, making his trial and death a tragedy too.
But Is This Socrates?
A reader who is familiar with Kierkegaard’s mastery of pseudonyms and indirection might well ask at this point whether this final portrait of Socrates, in the writings after Postscript and up until he died, might not be just another caricature. Why, after all, might this last Socrates not have been merely another mask that Kierkegaard might have discarded when the time was right?
The answer has to be that Kierkegaard cannot allow this to happen, or much of the argumentation centered around Socrates will collapse. Another thinker might get away with using the figure of Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own opinions, but not Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard needs an authentic, historical Socrates, or he will have no way to distinguishing Socrates from Plato; and that distinction is the fulcrum upon which much else turns. For that matter, Kierkegaard needs Socrates as his final appeal, not only against incipient speculative tendencies in Plato, but also, and more importantly, against philosophical and religious pretensions of any kind. That is why Kierkegaard has to spend so many pages in the first part of his dissertation sifting through the various pieces of evidence from Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes, and others regarding Socrates’ life and opinions.
Some at least of the material in the dissertation and in Fragments is ironical, but Kierkegaard thinks--though he may be wrong--that the warning signs for the irony are clearly marked. That is the way irony has to be carried out, the dissertation insists. After all, if irony is not self-canceling for those “in the know,” it ceases to be irony at all. The irony in Fragments differs greatly from that in the dissertation in many ways; but Postscript insists that, there too, to read that volume without irony is to have “an utterly wrong impression of the book.”
Still, Kierkegaard may fail in his efforts at irony, either through his own mistakes or through the dullness of his interpreters. The most problematic part of his picture of Socrates is its apparent similarity to the Christ figure he is developing within those same works. Sometimes it seems as if the Socrates as truth-martyr Kierkegaard describes in the late works, after Postscript, has been conflated with Christ, and the death scene from the Phaedo with Calvary.
If such confusion arises, it is not for lack of warnings from Kierkegaard. Again and again in these late works Kierkegaard brings out the differences between Socrates and Christ, even more sharply than he had before. The distinction between Socrates and Christ is in fact drawn as sharply in these late works as it ever was, even in Philosophical Fragments, and indeed, unlike that book, in a countless variety of ways. rather than by one, clear dividing line. One particularly important distinction he makes is between Socratic and Christian dialectic. Socrates, he says, “in the service of knowledge . . . understood the art of questioning, how by the question to imprison everyone who answered in ignorance. But the “essentially Christian . . . is not related to knowing but to acting” and “has the singular characteristic of answering and by means of the answer imprisoning everyone in the task.” These two distinctions, between being imprisoned by a question, and being imprisoned by an answer, and then between knowing and acting, mark deep divides between Socrates and the essentially Christian that Kierkegaard wants to emphasize rather than to bridge over. Similarly, in Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard directly opposes the Socratic definition of sin with the Christian rather than pairing them together. Again, he writes, Socrates “did not know that the neighbor existed and that one should love him,” whereas Christ embodied neighbor love,” and it would be harder to find a more basic difference than that.
Instead of turning into a divine or semi-divine figure, Socrates emerges in Kierkegaard’s late works as a model of the intellectual part of a truly human life, a role that is at once more comic and more tragic than Kierkegaard had imagined earlier. In fact, Kierkegaard comes to identify with Socrates’ life as if it were his own, and he sometimes has difficulty keeping the personal parallels out of his text. In a draft for a section of Works of Love, entitled “A Self-Defense,” which Kierkegaard later omitted from the text, he makes the identification explicit: “the better journalists do not have the courage to write about how envy and cowardice and flabbiness and rabble-barbarism are at work in the demoralization of Denmark. I am well aware that the danger I am exposing myself by saying this is not the usual one . . .” It is not government persecution, for example, but “the crowd” that is the dangerous power, with its weapons of town gossip and public opinion. “And this is the danger to which I am exposing myself, this frighting with shadows, as Socrates calls it in his defense when he declares that those who accuse him today are mentioned by name, but those who over the years have accused him are like shadows. And this is the danger to which I am exposing myself, that it is doubtful whether I am doing a good work or something presumptuous, in proportion to whether one deigns to call town gossip public opinion in Denmark or not.”
Perhaps that is the reason for Kierkegaard’s picture of Socrates in his mature works, that he simply read into Socrates’ final days the same tensions he, too, faced at the end of his life. Perhaps that is the way it was; but I do not believe it.
One of the basic hurdles preventing one from understanding a text. it seems to me, can be a lack of emotional and even moral development, a kind of background that is not to be gained from books, at least not just from books, but only through personal experience. When Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation about Socrates he had already grasped the ideas of Socrates’ Apology in amazing depth, and there is little about Socrates’ Apology in Kierkegaard’s later writings that is not to be found there. In his dissertation he was, moreover, already convinced that the Apology was an accurate account of what had happened at Socrates’ trial; whether or not it was an exact transcript did not matter. What made Kierkegaard find the Apology and the final scene in the Phaedo to be the keys to the interpretation of Socrates’ mission was that he was able to go beyond that dissertation level of understanding, because he shared with Socrates a set of experiences at the end of his life that supplied him with a distinctive hermeneutical resource.
When Kierkegaard fell down in the street in 1855 and had to be carried to the hospital, only to die shortly thereafter, he left unpublished on his desk the last of his ten part attack on the Danish establishment, and in that manuscript was an article on “My Task,” with a passage directed to Socrates: “The only analogy I have before me is Socrates, my task is a Socratic one, to audit the definition of what it is to be a Christian--I do not call myself a Christian (keeping the ideal free) but I can make it manifest that the others are that even less. You, antiquity’s noble simple soul, you, the only human being I admiringly acknowledge as a thinker: there is only a little preserved about you, of all people the only true martyr of intellectuality, just as great qua character as qua thinker . . .how I long to be able to speak with you for only a half hour . . .”
Only a half hour, he writes! But with two men such as Kierkegaard and Socrates, whose lives were so closely aligned, that might have been enough.