Hamann and the Tradition

5. Metaschematizing Socrates: Hamann, Kierkegaard, and Kant on the Value of the Enlightenment (Kelly Dean Jolley)

79 5 Metaschematizing Socrates: Hamann, Kierkegaard, and Kant on the Value of the Enlightenment Kelly Dean Jolley The highest perfection of a thing is to be subject to that which perfects it. —Iulia De Beausobre, Flame in the Snow This chapter looks like commentary on J. G. Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia and on various works of Kierkegaard’s that address and assess Socrates, like On Irony or Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The looks of the chapter are not entirely misleading. But the relationship between the chapter and Hamann and Kierkegaard’s work is more complicated. The names “Hamann” and “Kierkegaard” as I use them do refer (narrowly ) to Hamann and Kierkegaard, but they also refer (broadly) to what might be called their shared orientation on a problematic—the problematic of the value of the Enlightenment. I use the name of “Kant” in the same (narrow and broad) way: it refers to Kant but also to an orientation , an orientation on the same problematic, but one that opposes Hamann and Kierkegaard’s. What I am doing is contributing to a genre that includes centrally Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia, the genre of metaschematism.1 Hamann presents a portrait of Socrates meant to be a portrait that Kant (and other Enlighteners) would find convicting—meaning that they would find it convincing, and that they would weigh themselves against it and 80 K E L L Y D E A N J O L L E Y find themselves wanting (both as philosophers and as Christians). My essay comments on Hamann and Kierkegaard’s portrait of Socrates, and it is intended to add to their portrait. Unlike them, I am not as much concerned with the historical Socrates as I am with the Socrates of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. So, I add to their portrait certain doctrines associated with the Platonic Socrates, like the so-called Socratic Paradox: to know the good is to do the good. My aim is to show that the Platonic Socrates can be seen metaschematically, as Hamann and Kierkegaard saw the historical Socrates. That is, I aim to show that the Platonic Socrates can be seen as a proto-Christian, and thus as a figure opposed to the Enlightenment , instead of one fit to be the Enlightenment’s poster boy. Socrates Socrates is a pivotal figure for Hamann and for Kierkegaard. We might call him the unwobbling pivot of their thinking and writing. For each, Socrates’ life is an example of an exemplary life. I want to begin by concentrating on the indirection of Socrates’ life. He binds his indirection to his ignorance and his irony. When Kierkegaard thinks about indirect communication, he has in mind a kind of communication that is not an alternative to direct communication .2 That is, he is not thinking of some sort of communicative content that could be expressed directly or indirectly, indifferently. Nor is he thinking of communicative content that could be expressed directly , but which, for external reasons—say, reasons of secrecy or danger or something of that sort—is best expressed indirectly. He thinks of a different kind of communicative content, a kind expressible only in indirection . Understood in this way, logical relations between direct communicative content and indirect communicative content become problematic . Indirect content enters into no straightforward logical relations with direct content: indirect content is not straightforwardly implied by, contradictory of, or consistent or inconsistent with direct content. In indirect communication, what is to be communicated does not share its “logical space” with what is directly communicated. Even more, receiving indirect communication differs from receiving direct communication. To receive indirect communication, as Kierkegaard thinks of it, is to be changed—it is not just to receive information, an opinion, that is added to our collection of opinions and which may require some reshuffling of those opinions. It is instead to receive something that requires not that we change our opinions on some matter or add to our stock of opinions 81 M E T A S C H E M A T I Z I N G S O C R A T E S on some matter, it requires a change of mind, of the mind itself. It requires a change in what we are, and not merely in what we opine. Receiving indirect communication requires repentance. Despite the fact that Socrates begins his conversations with his interlocutors in a way that suggests that he wants...