The Literary Kierkegaard

Chapter One: From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates

Chapter One  From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates If Harold Bloom is correct to deem Plato’s contest with Homer “the central agon of Western literature,”1 Socrates’ banishment of the poets from the ideal city in Plato’s Republic was the inaugural blast in that ageless conflict. Yet surely the earlier satirizing of Socrates by Aristophanes in his comedy Clouds (Nephelai, Latin: Nubes) amounts to a precipitative potshot, one that Plato seeks to avenge through his own unflattering depiction of Aristophanes in the Symposium. The present chapter considers the embroilment of Søren Kierkegaard in this same agon or struggle, which, from his years as a university student to the end of his life, persists in his writings as a dialectic tension manifest in his dueling allegiances to the philosopher Socrates and to the poet-playwright Aristophanes. With Socrates, Kierkegaard felt “an inexplicable rapport from a very early age,”2 and he came to cherish Socrates as one of his two exemplars. The chief focus of Kierkegaard’s M.A. dissertation On the Concept of Irony, Socrates always henceforth occupied the loftiest spot in Kierkegaard’s estimation of human beings—excepting his other, primary exemplar, Christ. The emulation of the anti-Sophist Socrates and the anti-pharisaic Christ is already discernible in Kierkegaard’s antagonism toward his former professor Hans Lassen Martensen and the poet and playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “in whom equal portions of sophism and pharisaism had fused into a fussy refinement” (SKB 318). Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonym of Fear and Trembling, calls Socrates “the most interesting man who ever lived” (SV1 3:131/FT 83), and Kierkegaard is looked back upon as the “Danish Socrates” or “modern Socrates,”3 “the Christianizer of the Greek sage,”4 and hence “Christianity’s Socrates.”5 For all the attention scholars pay to the love Kierkegaard shows for Socrates as thinker and “prototype,” scant attention is paid to his 55 reverence for Aristophanes as literary artist. Readers considering the seventh of The Concept of Irony’s fourteen theses, that “Aristophanes has come very close to the truth in his depiction of Socrates” (SV1 13:99/CI 6), have mostly ignored the question of Kierkegaard’s relation to Aristophanes . When Aristophanes is considered at all, the tendency is to regard him with Plato and Xenophon as one of the three lenses through which Kierkegaard tries to fathom the Athenian sage. Oddly, despite the dissertation’s pivotal thesis on Aristophanes; despite the importance of the comic as an aesthetic and existential category throughout the subsequent pseudonymous writings; and despite Kierkegaard’s established patronage of the arts, his personal interactions with some of the most famous actors and actresses of his time, his occasional writings on the performing arts, and his countless references to playwrights (above all, to Sophocles, Shakespeare, Holberg, Molière, Goethe, Oehlenschläger, Scribe, and Heiberg, aside from Aristophanes)6 —despite all these points, Kierkegaard’s views on the preeminent comic dramatist of ancient Greece remain generally unappreciated. This neglect seems curious. Given Kierkegaard’s amply documented lifelong passion for the theater , George Pattison rightly notes that the theater world “pervades his authorship, providing him with a constant supply of illustrative material ” and “a paradigm of the aesthetic consciousness, a paradigm which relates equally to aesthetics (as the sphere of artistic practices) and ‘the aesthetic’ (as an existential category).”7 According to Bloom, who sees Heine as having deified Aristophanes, Kierkegaard may not have agreed theologically with that deification, “but as a writer he kept his awareness of Aristophanes.”8 Aristophanes, Socrates, and Clouds Clouds, the earliest surviving document that mentions Socrates,9 was initially performed at the Great Dionysia in 423 BCE. The play features Socrates as its main subject, and is seen to attack him as “the archsophist , atheist, and corrupter of the young.”10 He appears as a quack pedagogue who holes up in his phrontistērion or “thinkery” amid pale, nerdish pupils; devotes himself to astronomy, at times while suspended aloft in a basket, and to the study of subterranean phenomena; denies the traditional deities while revering clouds and air; allows students to be trained to win an argument regardless of whether it be right or wrong;11 and charges a fee for his instruction, or so it seems to some.12 Clouds failed upon its first and only attested performance, although 56 Chapter One Aristophanes deemed it his most sophisticated...