If there is an overarching theme of ancient Greek philosophy, it is the problem of the best life. Although the most famous statement on this subject remains Socratesâ enigmatically negative declaration that âthe unexamined life is not worth living for a human beingâ (Plato, Apology 38a), the fundamental characteristics of the philosophersâ approach to this problemâtheir association of rational inquiry with virtue and happiness, their claim to special knowledge of the hidden nature of reality, and their critical correction of the poetico-religious traditionâwere already in place by the sixth century bce, when Xenophanes of Colophon praised the rational acquisition of ânoble wisdomâ and reproached Homer and Hesiod for fabricating base lies about the gods. Xenophanesâ theology began by exposing the self-serving relativity of the poetic imagination (âEthiopians have gods with snub noses and black hairâ; âhorses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxenâ) and culminated in the striking declaration that there is a supreme and motionless god, utterly unlike mortals in body and mind, who effortlessly sets all things in motion by thought (Freeman 1948, 22â3, fragments 15, 16, 23â6). His exaltation of the philosophical life and depreciation of the poetic tradition were reflected in the writings of Parmenides and Heraclitus in the fifth century and Plato and Aristotle in the fourth.
However, poetry was not without its champions. No counter-attack was more succinct, or more earth-scorchingly negative, than that of Gorgias, a teacher of rhetoric who argued for the falsehood of the three most basic axioms of philosophy. Recalling the Chaos or infinite abyss from which Hesiod derives all things, Gorgiasâ book On Nature claims that (1) There is nothing; (2) Even if there were something, it could not be known; (3) Even if it could be known, it could not be communicated (Freeman 1948, 128â9). Gorgiasâ deconstruction of the plenitude of intelligible and articulable being aims to reduce philosophy, at best, to the mystical silence of purely private experience. If any one of his theses is correctâa possibility that haunts the entire Western philosophical traditionâany positive account of the fundamental nature of reality is radically poetic, in that it produces the âknowledgeâ that it was supposed merely to have conveyed.
Perhaps no modern philosopher has examined the problem of how to live more deeply and deliberately than SĂžren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaardâs understanding of this problem was decisively shaped by his study of the ancient Greeks at the University of Copenhagen. In particular, the dialogues of Plato and the comic dramas of Aristophanes gave him a conceptual and literary vocabulary with which to think and write (more precisely, to think through writing) about the human soul and its relationship to the ultimate reality of being or nothingness, God or Chaos. Starting with the dissertation that he defended in 1841, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Kierkegaard locates the ambiguous polarity of philosophyâis it a disorienting dream of wakefulness, or a path to wisdom and goodness?âin the charged figure of Socrates, around whom storms of controversy have gathered since at least 423 bce, when Aristophanesâ Clouds was produced in Athens. The dissertation reprises the quarrel between the Socratics and the poets that is initiated in the Clouds and continued in Platoâs Symposium, in which the character of Aristophanes is Socratesâ primary antagonist. The Clouds depicts Socratesâ students as pale shades of men, starved of physical, spiritual, and emotional nourishment; Socrates himself worships vaporous beings given evanescent form by speechâClouds, Chaos, Vortex, Aether, Respiration, and Air, shaped by Tongue. In the Symposium, however, a deeply hurt Alcibiadesâwho feels himself a jilted lover and a philosophical casualty of Socratesânevertheless portrays him as vitally, paradoxically human: his solid carapace of manly virtue turns out to be a womb teeming with images âdivine and golden and altogether beautiful and amazingâ (Symposium 217a). The Concept of Irony fuses these opposing views of Socrates into an intrinsically unstable compound. The collapse of Being into Nothing at the beginning of Hegelâs Logic generates the dialectical development of Becoming (Hegel 1975, § 85⧠87); in the same way, the energy produced by the internal oscillation of Socrates between sterile emptiness and fertile substantiality ultimately propels him beyond the Athenian context, and toward a mode of existence associated more with Jerusalem and Rome. For in his later writings, Kierkegaard comes to regard him as an avatar of absolute or unconditioned reality, construes his erotic longing for wisdom as an analogue of the love of the God of Scripture, and finds in his public philosophizing a model for his own role as a gadfly of Christendom.1
It must be observed that Kierkegaardâs existential debt to Socrates is inseparable from his literary debt to Plato and Aristophanes. Since antiquity, the name âSocratesâ has designated a charismatic and multilayered or âironicâ historical personality who is inaccessible apart from his equally ironic literary representations. Plato, who never speaks in his own voice, depicts Socrates in both performed and narrated dialogues; some of the latter involve complex chains of transmission with multiple opportunities for editorial alteration. In his pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard transposes Platonic dialogue into another key, producing authors who write or edit their own books and choose their own pen names (cf. SKS 7, 569â71 / CUP1, 625â7). However, there is a more important way in which Kierkegaardâs relationship to the literary Socrates of antiquity recapitulates Platoâs relationship to the historical Socrates. For Kierkegaard as for Plato, contact with Socrates results in a conversion or turning (ÏΔÏÎčαγÏγΟ) of the soul toward truth that is achieved through an explosion of poetic and philosophical creativityâa demonstration of Socratesâ pedagogical potency that implicitly resolves the âancient quarrel between philosophy and poetryâ (Republic 518c, 607b).
Let me elaborate. An obscure and ambiguous pronouncement in Platoâs Second Letter presents his authorship in the form of a riddle: âthere are no writings of Plato, nor will there ever be, but those now said to be his are of a Socrates grown beautiful [or ânobleâ] and youngâ (Second Letter 314c). The clear implication of this statement, which Kierkegaard echoes when he asserts that âin the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by meâ (SKS 7, 570 / CUP1, 626), is that Platoâs writings are by a rejuvenated and ennobled Socrates as well as about himâbut what does this mean? One might reply that, having been permanently and profoundly transformed by his relationship with the historical Socrates, Plato poetically produces the Socrates whom we find in the dialogues. Yet this formulation divides what Plato suggests is an organic and developing whole. In attributing his writings to a young and beautiful Socrates, Plato binds subject and object, activity and passivity, into a dynamic and reciprocal relationship. Any attempt to explain his authorship in terms of a non-Platonic Socratesâor a non-Socratic Platoâis therefore a dead end. Platoâs Socrates is the literary production of Socratesâ Plato; to the extent that each is the offspring of the other, one might say that Plato and Socrates combine to give birth to themselves in the dialogues.
Kierkegaard relates to the provocatively ambiguous Socrates whom he observes through the binocular lenses of Plato and Aristophanes in a precisely analogous way. Socrates is a living presence in his writings, and not simply in the sense that he grows or develops over the course of the authorship. In remaining open to the mystery of Socrates, in continuing to chart depths of meaning beneath the surface of his irony, Kierkegaard lets himself be transformed by what he comes to understandâwhich is to say that he learns Socratically (cf. Republic 490aâb). Gorgias cl...
