Søren
Kierkegaard Newsletter — Number 49: August 2005
Kierkegaard on Socrates in
the Journals and Papers
Kierkegaard mentions the name of Socrates in the Hong edition of his journals and papers well over two hundred times.[i] Some of his remarks revolve around themes familiar from the pseudonymous works, such as Socrates’ existential “proof” for the immortality of the soul, the significance of his example for the Christian dialectician, his exemplary use of indirect communication, his attention to the single individual, his negativity, and his emphasis on doing as the proper criterion of knowing.[ii] On other occasions, Kierkegaard reflects on the Socratic nature of his own task. “I wonder if it did not go with Socrates in his age as with me,” he muses in a typical entry. “He came to be regarded as representing evil, for in those days ignorance was looked upon as evil—and yet Socrates was in truth the physician.”[iii] Yet another significant set of entries explores Socrates’ anticipation of Christian existence—a theme that is especially prominent in Kierkegaard’s later years. “This Socratic thesis is of utmost importance for Christianity,” he writes in 1850:
Virtue cannot be taught; that is, it is not a doctrine, it is a being-able, an exercising, an existing [Existeren], an existential [existentiel] transformation, and therefore it is so slow to learn, not at all as simple and easy as the rote-learning of one more language or one more system. No, in respect to virtue there is always particular emphasis on the internal, the inward, “the single individual.”[iv]
And in 1854, Kierkegaard observes that “just as Socrates is said to have talked continually only about pack asses and leather tanners etc. . . . so Christianity uses the same words and expressions we human beings use and yet says something entirely different from what we say.”[v]
Socrates’ efforts to reach the single individual inevitably suggest a comparison to Christian reformers, and ultimately to Christ himself. In comparison to Socrates, Kierkegaard writes in 1850, Luther “took the matter too lightly.” “He ought to have made it obvious that the freedom he was fighting for . . . leads to making life infinitely more strenuous than it was before.” Instead, Luther “swung off too hastily”:
Jubilantly . . . the contemporary age embraced his cause, joined the party—Luther wants to topple the Pope—bravo! Well, all I can say is that this is pure political bargaining. . . . I have the deepest respect for Luther—but was he a Socrates? No, no, far from that. When I talk purely and simply about man I say: Of all men old Socrates is the greatest—Socrates, the hero and martyr of intellectuality. Only you understood what it is to be a reformer, understood what it meant for you yourself to be that, and were that.[vi]
In another entry from the same year, Kierkegaard writes: “Outside of Christianity Socrates stands alone—you noble, simple wise man—you were actually a reformer.”[vii] And in 1849, he asserts that Socrates “is the only one, is ‘the martyr’ in the eminent sense, the greatest man.” Christ, on the other hand, cannot be called a martyr because he “was not a witness to truth but was ‘the truth.’”[viii]
This is not all. In an entry from 1853, Kierkegaard muses on the situation of philosophy after Socrates and Christianity after Christ. “They say,” he writes, that whereas “in Socrates philosophy was as yet merely a life,” it subsequently becomes doctrine and then scientific scholarship, from whose heights we now “look back at Socrates as inferior.” So, too, “in Christ, in the apostles, in the first Christians Christianity was as yet . . . merely a life. . . . and now we stand at the pinnacle of scientific scholarship and look back on the first Christians, for in them Christianity was as yet merely a life.”[ix] How, then, can we recover the Socratic or the Christian life? This question leads directly into Kierkegaard’s most provocative reflections on Socrates.
In a journal entry from 1849, Kierkegaard explains that Christ provides not only the prototype or archetype of the Christian life, but also a ladder, so to speak, to help one climb up to the archetype:
When we humble ourselves, then Christ is pure compassion. And in our striving to approach the prototype [Forbilledet], the prototype itself is again our very help. It alternates; when we are striving, then he is the prototype; and when we stumble, lose courage, etc., then he is the love which helps us up, and then he is the prototype again.[x]
Christ is thus not only the truth but the way to the truth, in that his example furnishes us with the condition for understanding and appropriating the very truth that he exemplifies.
The Socratic case is fundamentally different: the condition for understanding the truth is one that all human beings are already supposed to possess. This condition turns out to be not simply reason, but the desire to learn the truth—the passion of philosophical eros of which Johannes Climacus makes much in Philosophical Fragments. Eros makes possible more than understanding, for it is also the condition for existing in the light of this understanding. It is the way to the truth that answers to the example of Christ in Christianity. Yet in his journals and papers, Kierkegaard makes it clear that Socrates’ philosophical passion is extraordinary. He indicates that Socrates is unique in being able, without following Christ’s example, to live up to his understanding of the truth and thus to actualize the ideal. Others simply lack the depth of passion—in other words, the condition of genuinely philosophical eros—that makes this possible. Nor can Socrates give this condition to anyone else, for in order to do so he would have to be a god. For Kierkegaard, the problem with Socratic philosophizing is thus not that it is too low in comparison with faith, but that it is too high for ordinary human beings. Because ordinary human beings lack the means to appropriate the truth on their own, Christ gives them a ladder with which to climb up to his example. Socrates, however, can furnish no such aid.
Kierkegaard spells out the foregoing understanding of Socrates in a long entry from 1854.[xi] The general theme of this entry is the difference between poetry and actuality, a theme Kierkegaard introduces by observing that the extraordinary wittiness of Socrates’ speeches in the Apology can make us “read him as if he were an author” and thereby forget that “the stakes are life and death.” Socrates seems to combine poetry and actuality in his own person in a way that is altogether unique:
Socrates is the only one of his kind! Such a cultivated intellect, so very subtly educated and sharpened that presumably such a man would need all the coddling and all the remoteness from actuality that a poet, an artist, needs—and then to be the toughest character in Greece, one who does not produce in a study but in the most crucial actuality, with everything at stake and face to face with death, infuses this subtle intellect so subtly into every line, so magnificently into even the most unimportant turn.
What my pseudonyms frequently say could be said of Socrates: His life is not a drama for men but for the gods; spectators such as he required are found almost as rarely as a Socrates.
In this passage, Kierkegaard suggests that Socrates’ speeches and deeds, even in the midst of exigent circumstances, reflect the sort of poetic perfection one normally associates with a carefully composed text. But this point alone does not explain why most human beings are not fit spectators of his life’s drama. What does Kierkegaard mean to say here?
Kierkegaard makes himself more clear in the immediate sequel, in which he reflects on “the Socratic principle” that “to understand, truly to understand, is to be.”
For us more ordinary men this divides and becomes twofold: it is one thing to understand and another to be. Socrates is so elevated that he does away with this distinction—and therefore we are unable to understand him, understand him in the most profound, the Socratic, sense.
Socrates’ life is graced by an extraordinary integrity of understanding and existing. In him, speech and deed are one; his actions are fully in harmony with his grasp of the truth. But if understanding and being are one and the same—and this is what is expressed in the Socratic principle that virtue is knowledge—then one who falls short in the domain of being will also fall short in the domain of understanding, and vice versa. If, for example, my deeds fail to reflect my understanding of justice, it would follow that I do not truly understand justice. By the same token, those “more ordinary men” whose existence reflects a division between understanding and being cannot truly understand Socrates. In Kierkegaard’s imagination, Socrates’ life is properly a spectacle for the gods because they, too, do what they know and know what they do, for which reason only they can fully appreciate his godlike integrity.
The upshot of these reflections is something quite surprising. Whereas the philosophical hypothesis that Johannes Climacus develops in Philosophical Fragments implies that Socrates lacked “the consciousness of sin,” which “only the gods could teach,”[xii] Kierkegaard suggests another reason why Socrates might have lacked this consciousness: he was one of the only human beings ever to have been without sin.
Outside of Christianity Socrates is the only man of whom it may be said: he explodes existence, which is seen quite simply in his elimination of the separation between poetry and actuality. Our lives are such that a poet portrays ideality—but actuality is a devil of a lot different. Socrates is an ideality higher than any poet is able to poetize it, and he actually is this, it is his actuality. This is why it is all wrong for Oehlenschläger to want to poetize Socrates.[xiii] In relation to Socrates “the poet” is a completely superfluous person who can only become an object of ridicule, a laughing-stock, when he does not keep the proper distance but even wants to poetize him. What does it mean to poetize? It means to contribute ideality. The poet takes an actuality which lacks something of ideality and adds to it, and this is the poem. But, good God, Your Lordship, there is no need at all to add anything here; Socrates' ideality is higher, and it is that precisely by being actuality.
If Socrates did not acknowledge the perversity of the will that drives a wedge between what we do and what we understand,[xiv] it is, Kierkegaard suggests, simply because he had no experience of this perversity. It is true that he was not a Christian, but he did not need Christianity. He was able to hold truth together with existence, the ideal together with the actual, because his will was completely in accord with his understanding of the good. This unity of willing and understanding, rooted as it is in Socrates’ extraordinary philosophical eros, puts him both existentially and intellectually beyond the reach of ordinary human beings.[xv] By the same token, however, it puts the rest of us beyond his reach. As the only man outside of Christianity to explode existence, Socrates would seem to combine ideality and actuality in a manner reminiscent of Christ. Not being a god, however, he was limited by his experience and so could not know what Christ knew—and what we know—about sin. Without this knowledge, it could not occur to him that others might lack the condition for understanding the truth—much less that this condition cannot be supplied in the absence of a concrete example that would not only give them something to imitate, but also teach them how to imitate it.[xvi]
We would be remiss to conclude without noting that the foregoing account of the Athenian philosopher contains a deep ambiguity. Kierkegaard insists that Socrates’ actuality cannot be poetized, for his “is an ideality higher than any poet is able to poetize it, and he actually is this, it is his actuality.” Yet his Socrates is the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, and Plato himself warns us in his Second Letter that “there are no writings of Plato nor will there ever be, but those now said to be his are of a Socrates grown beautiful and young” (314c). If in the dialogues Socrates has grown beautiful and young, has he not been poetized? And if neither Oehlenschläger nor anyone else can poetize Plato’s Socrates, might this not be because Plato has already poetized Socrates to the utmost extent? To add to these doubts, we may wonder whether Kierkegaard’s attempts to grasp Socrates’ actuality do not in themselves involve poetizing him. In an entry from 1848, Kierkegaard notes that whereas Christ is “eternally present,” Socrates “is present only historically.” For this reason, “it certainly does not help me to pray to Socrates: what I am to know about him I must learn from history or shape it out of my own head.” [xvii] One’s suspicion that Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates might in part be “shaped out of his own head” is strengthened by another entry from 1848, in which he observes that “ no one can really learn anything from the past . . . because it is the past and consequently can only be comprehended by the imagination. But imagination and the medium of imagination is a medium of ideality.” He goes on to advert to Socrates in the course of noting that “ideality is the very contradiction of being in actuality; only in the medium of ideality can a man be so ideal that he is ideal at every moment—in actuality this is impossible.”[xviii]
One of Kierkegaard’s last journal entries on Socrates is a wistful expression of the mystery of his human accomplishment, a mystery that moves away from us and toward eternity, and thus in the opposite direction of revelation.
Socrates is the only person who solved the problem: he took everything, everything, with him to the grave. Marvelous Socrates, you performed a feat which remains eternally just as difficult, if anyone should want to repeat it; you left nothing, nothing, nothing, not even the thinnest thread of a result which a professor could grab onto; no, you took everything along to the grave. This way you kept the highest enthusiasm closed up airtight in the most eminent reflection and sagacity, kept it for eternity—you took everything along.[xix]
Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2006.
[i] Citations are from Søren Kierkegaard’s Journal and Papers, six vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978). Henceforth JP, cited by entry number, volume and page number in the Hong edition, and arrangement and notation in the Heiberg-Kuhr-Torsting edition of the Papirer.
[ii] On the soul’s
immortality see JP 73, 1.27 (X.2 A 406), JP 255, 1.108 (IX A 32), and JP 4280,
4.214 (X.3 A 315); on Socrates’ dialectical example JP 373, 1.153 (VIII.1 A
547) and JP 390, 1.161 (X.2 A 453); on his use of indirect communication JP
649, 1.273 (VIII.2 B 81); on his attention to the single individual JP 2030,
2.413 (X.3 A 476) and JP 4295, 4.219 (X.5 A 133); on his negativity JP 754,
1.350-351 (III A 7); on knowing as doing JP 895, 1.400 (IV C 86) and JP 4765,
4.457-458 (X.4 A 138).
[iii] JP 4555, 4.355
(X.2 A 401); cf. JP 6532, 6.251 (X.2 A 195), JP 6839, 6.472-475 (X.5 A 104),
and JP 6901, 6.524-526 (XI.1 A 439).
[iv] JP 1060, 1.463
(X.2 A 606).
[v] JP 3532,
3.615-616 (XI.1 A 19); cf. JP 4264, 4.209 (VII.1 A 65) and JP 4290, 4.218 (X.4
A 497).
[vi] JP 2514, 3.80 (X2 A 559).
[vii] JP 6871, 6.508
(XI.1 A 133).
[viii] JP 2651, 3.160 (X.1 A 119).
[ix] JP 3317, 3.522 (X.5 A 113).
[x] 334, 1.140.
[xi] JP 4301, 4.221-223.
[xii] Philosophical Fragments, In Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 47.
[xiii] Adam Oehlenschläger was the
author of a book called Sokrates (
[xiv] Cf. the
following from an 1849 entry: “Socrates says it is impossible for a person
really to have understood, grasped, perceived the good and then do the evil—for
the proof that one has actually comprehended the good is precisely this, that
understanding exercises such power over a person that he does it; otherwise the
fact that a person does not do the good demonstrates that he has not understood
it. This is pure intellectuality, from
which Socrates does not emerge; he does not make room for the will, or room
within which the will can stir and move.”
JP 3194, 3.466 (X.1 A 392).
[xv] Kierkegaard disagrees with Johannes de Silentio on this point. “If there were no final lines from Socrates,” Silentio writes, “I could have imagined myself in his place and created some, and if I had been unable to do so, a poet would have managed it, but no poet can find his way to Abraham.” Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 118.
[xvi] In a journal entry from 1848, Kierkegaard had observed that Socrates and Christ had few imitators (JP 963,1.420 [IX A 372]). In the case of Socrates, this seems to have been an understatement.
[xvii] JP 318, 1.133 (VIII.1 A 565).
[xviii] JP 1054 1.458-459 (IX A 382)
[xix] JP 4303, 4.224.