"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

crucial importance. It shows that, helped by the sage who would
not directly help any one, he had found the master key: his own
interpretation of life. Indeed, all the following literary output may
be regarded as the consistent development of the simple directing
thoughts of his firstling work. And we must devote what may seem
a disproportionate amount of space to the explanation of these
thoughts if we would enter into the world of his mind.

Not only did Kierkegaard feel kinship with Socrates. It did not
escape him that there was an ominous similarity between Socrates'
times and his own between the period of flourishing Attica,
eminent in the arts and in philosophy, when a little familiarity with
the shallow phrases of the Sophists enabled one to have an opinion
about everything on earth and in heaven, and his own Copenhagen
in the thirties of the last century, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg had
popularized Hegelian philosophy with such astonishing success
that the very cobblers were using the Hegelian terminology, with
"Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis," and one could get instructions
from one's barber, while being shaved, how to "harmonize the
ideal with reality, and our wishes with what we have attained."
Every difficulty could be "mediated," according to this recipe. And
just as the great questioner of Athens gave pause to his more naЛve
contemporaries by his "know thyself," so Kierkegaard insisted that
he must rouse his contemporaries from their philosophic
complacency and unwarranted optimism, and move them to realize
that the spiritual life has both mountain and valley, that it is no flat
plain easy to travel. He intended to show difficulties where the
road had been supposedly smoothed for them.

Central, both in the theory and in the practice of Socrates
(according to Kierkegaard), is his irony. The ancient sage would
stop old and young and quizz them skilfully on what they regarded
as common and universally established propositions, until his
interlocutor became confused by some consequence or
contradiction arising unexpectedly, and until he who had been sure
of his knowledge was made to confess his ignorance, or even to
become distrustful of the possibility of knowledge. Destroying
supposedly positive values, this method would seem to lead to a
negative result only.

Kierkegaard makes less (and rather too little) of the positive side
of Socrates' method, his maieutic, or midwifery, by which we are
led inductively from trivial instances to a new definition of a
conception, a method which will fit all cases. Guided by a lofty
personality, this Socratic irony becomes, in Kierkegaard's
definition, merely "the negative liberation of subjectivity"; that is,
not the family, nor society, nor the state, nor any rules
superimposed from outside, but one's innermost self (or
subjectivity) is to be the determining factor in one's life. And
understood thus, irony as a negative element borders on the ethical