Irrational Man by William Barrett

Author:William Barrett [Barrett, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307761088
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-25T21:00:00+00:00

2. SOCRATES AND HEGEL; EXISTENCE AND REASON

His own explanation of his point of departure as a thinker is given in a characteristically vivid and Kierkegaardian passage in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. While he sat one Sunday afternoon in the Fredriksberg Garden in Copenhagen smoking a cigar as was his habit, and turning over a great many things in his mind, he suddenly reflected that he had as yet made no career for himself whereas everywhere around him he saw the men of his age becoming celebrated, establishing themselves as renowned benefactors of mankind. They were benefactors because all their efforts were directed at making life easier for the rest of mankind, whether materially by constructing railroads, steamboats, or telegraph lines, or intellectually by publishing easy compendiums to universal knowledge, or—most audacious of all—spiritually by showing how thought itself could make spiritual existence systematically easier and easier. Kierkegaard’s cigar burned down, he lighted another, the train of reflection held him. It occurred to him then that since everyone was engaged everywhere in making things easy, perhaps someone might be needed to make things hard again; that life might become so easy that people would want the difficult back again; and that this might be a career and destiny for him.

The irony is delicious and thoroughly Socratic, and appropriately so, since the task it marked out for Kierkegaard was parallel to that of Socrates. As the ancient Socrates played the gadfly for his fellow Athenians stinging them into awareness of their own ignorance, so Kierkegaard would find his task, he told himself, in raising difficulties for the easy conscience of an age that was smug in the conviction of its own material progress and intellectual enlightenment. He would be a modern and Christian gadfly as Socrates had been an ancient and pagan one.

Now, it was no accident that the name of Socrates came to Kierkegaard’s mind in his meditation on his life’s task. The ancient Greek sage held a special place in his affections, due not only to the power of the Socratic personality but also to basic philosophic principle. In his estimate of Socrates, as on most other points, Kierkegaard is the diametrical opposite of Nietzsche: the two agree only in the importance they attach to the gadfly of Athens. Kierkegaard was interested not at all in the Socrates who figures in some of Plato’s writings as the mouthpiece of Platonism; his attachment rather was to the man Socrates, the concrete man of flesh and blood, who said that he had no system or doctrine to teach, that in fact he had no knowledge of his own, but could only play the midwife to other men in bringing to birth the knowledge they had within themselves. In comparison with a modern philosopher like Hegel, who claims to have knowledge of the whole of reality or at least can find a place for everything within his System, old Socrates would seem to cut a very poor figure indeed. However, if philosophy is,

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