The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard

6. The Figure of Socrates and the Climacean Capacity of Paradoxical Reason

133 six The Figure of Socrates and the Climacean Capacity of Paradoxical Reason I have said that ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most high. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. (Psalms 82:6) That . . . ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world. (2 Peter 1:4) Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (2 Philippians 2:12–13) A human being is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, and of the temporal and the eternal. (CUP, 56, 92) What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties . . . in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god . . . and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Shakespeare, Hamlet) Philosophical Fragments officially confines human beings within seemingly rigid limits,1 but it also suggests that the man Socrates transcends these limits. For example, Fragments claims that all non-Christians “move away” from the truth of Christianity, but it also intimates that 134 · The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard Socrates longs for and prepares himself for the mystery of Christ. Bearing in mind that a climacus is a ladder,2 we might say that Fragments dramatically depicts Socrates as a climacean figure, or as a climber over boundaries and a transgressor of limits, and that the function of this depiction is to provoke readers to become aware of their own climacean capacity and to inspire them to use it. This present chapter is an explication of Kierkegaard’s artful use of the climacean figure of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. What Fragments merely suggests about Socrates, other works of Kierkegaard say more or less explicitly. Therefore, to make it easier to detect and decipher the suggestions about Socrates in Fragments, we will briefly consider some more overt claims that Kierkegaard makes about him in other portions of his authorship. The Figure of Socrates in Kierkegaard’s Authorship as a Whole Kierkegaard is “definitely . . . convinced that [Socrates] has become” “a Christian” (PV, 54). In other words, he believes that the historical Socrates was a pilgrim on a path of spiritual growth that led him, postmortem , to faith in Christ, or that Socrates developed in himself wisdom , virtues, and desires that prepared him to understand, appreciate, and joyfully embrace Christian faith as the miraculous fulfillment of his existential striving. The remainder of this section elaborates the story that Kierkegaard tells of Socrates’ heroic quest for Christ. Socrates is for Kierkegaard a great exemplar of subjectivity, as he indicates by way of various paraphrases of subjectivity. That is to say, he calls Socrates simple, or a “single individual,” or describes him as practicing inwardness and primitivity, or as “continually express[ing] the existential,” or as “an existing individual who understood existing as the essential” (PV, 123; CUP, 206). Furthermore, Kierkegaard frequently attributes virtues of subjectivity to Socrates, as he does, for example, when he calls him wise, noble, or righteous. The subjectivity of Socrates and his journey toward Christian faith are not unrelated facts, but one and the same thing. The Postscript describes in great detail how subjectivity progresses by stages toward Christianity and situates Socrates within these stages as an “ethicist . . . bordering on the religious” (CUP, 503). Thus the Postscript places Socrates & Climacean capacity of paradoxical reason · 135 Socrates on the margins of “Religiousness A,” which is the last sphere of human development before Christian faith. Similarly, Kierkegaard claims that Socrates was a virtuoso of “infinite resignation” (which Silentio in Fear and Trembling calls the “last stage before faith”) when he writes that Socrates “is the only person who . . . took everything with him to the grave” (FT, 46; JP, 4:4303). In Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus writes the following about Socrates: Let us never forget that Socrates’ ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Let us never forget that it was out of veneration for God that he was ignorant, that as far as it was possible for a pagan he was on guard duty as a judge on the frontier between God and man keeping watch so that the deep gulf of qualitative difference between...