[MUSIC] One of the charges that was raised against Socrates was that he worshipped foreign gods that were not worshipped in Athens. This charge refers to what Socrates called his daimon. This is a Greek word that means literally a god or a spirit. In many of the Platonic dialogues, mention is made of Socrates' daimon as a kind of personal spirit or inner voice that advises him. Modern scholars have had difficulties making sense of this. Some try to interpret it as the voice of conscience while others regard it as a form of superstition. Something like a guardian angel. In his trial Socrates explains the daimon as follows. "…something divine and spiritual comes to me…. This has been coming to me as a kind of voice, beginning in childhood, and whenever it comes, it always diverts me from what I am about to do, but never urges me on." So Socrates claims that he has a private, inner voice that prevents him from getting into trouble by telling him not to do something that is ill-considered. But the daimon never offers him any positive suggestions for what he should do. The daimon is purely negative. Socrates believes that this also is a part of his divine mission and to be a part of the divine will. When the jurors convict him of the charges and sentence him to death he claims that he's not concerned about this since throughout the entire trial his daimon never once raised an objection to anything that he was saying or doing. A fact that Socrates takes to mean that everything is proceeding according to the divine will. Therefore, he concludes that he has nothing to fear. This was also an idea that Kierkegaard identified with. In his work, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, in which he reflects on his life and his writing career, he explains his conviction that his life has been driven by an invisible, divine governance. God had a plan for his life which Kierkegaard unwittingly realized. God was, in a sense, guiding Kierkegaard in his writings in the same way that Socrates' daimon was guiding him. Another feature of Socrates' thought is what is referred to as maieutics or the art of midwifery. The word maieutics simply comes from the Greek adjective maieutikos meaning of or about midwifery. Socrates explains that his mother was a midwife and that he took this art from her. When he questions people, the goal he claims is to get them to come to the truth for themselves. The idea is that they implicitly have the truth within themselves but without knowing this consciously. But this knowledge can be brought to light with the kind of leading questioning that Socrates engages in. A famous example of this is when Socrates questions an uneducated slave boy in dialogue the Meno, and merely by questioning without stating anything positive himself, he is able to lead the boy to an understanding of some of the basic principles of geometry. Everyone present is astonished that the boy apparently knew geometry ahead of time without ever having any instruction in it. This is consistent with Socrates' repeated claim that he doesn't teach anything. He claims merely to be a midwife who assists in the birth of ideas but himself doesn't produce them. He simply helps others to produce them and to evaluate them subsequently. The ideas lie hidden in the individuals themselves, without them even being aware of them. This later leads Socrates to a doctrine of innate ideas, that is the notion that we're born with certain ideas right from the start and that we know things before actually having any experience of the world. Socrates' maieutics is a motif that Kierkegaard also uses in his writings. He doesn't want to state explicitly what he thinks Christianity is, but by means of his writings he wants to help others to arrive at their own conception of it. It's my pleasure to have with me today Professor Peter Sajda from the Slovak Academy of Science in Bratislava. Professor Sajda is a leading international Kierkegaard scholar and he's done substantial work in the fields of Kierkegaard and mysticism and the 20th century reception of Kierkegaard's thought. Professor Sajda, why does Kierkegaard make use of Socrates, a pagan philosopher, for an understanding of what he takes to be the problems of Christianity or Christendom in his own day? Kierkegaard says sometimes that his philosophy revolves around a simple question, and the question is what does it mean to be a Christian? And as we know, Kierkegaard posed this question to himself, because it concerned his own life, his own existence, but he also posed this question to his contemporaries, to the age he was living in. And as far as he could see from most people this was an easy question with an easy answer. It was supposed that one is basically born a Christian, that one grows up in a Christian family, one's friends are Christians, one lives in a Christian state, as some would consider Denmark to be. So it was enough just to go with the crowd and there was no doubt about one's Christian identity. The identity was secure. There was no reason to question it, to debate it. So, Kierkegaard's question was in a way a provocation because he wanted to stir up a controversy about something that was considered completely uncontroversial. So how specifically do you see this as relevant for Socrates? I think that Kierkegaard saw in Socrates a thinker whose philosophy also revolved around a simple question. And again it was a question that was seen as a provocation and it turned into a problem something that was considered completely unproblematic. Socrates' question was what does it mean to be a human being? And Kierkegaard knows that in Socrates' time people were perfectly sure of being human and of knowing what does it mean to be a human being. But strangely enough, Socrates doubted that one is human simply by birth. Instead, he argued that we need to learn to be human, we need to learn what it means to be humans. And he considered this to be no easy task. He argued that every individual is faced with a task with this question and has to answer it with his or her own existence. So the question was addressed to the individual. The collective could not answer for the individual. The individual could not inherit the answer from the collective or delegate it to the collective. And I think that in this Socrates was a source of inspiration for Kierkegaard because also the the question, what does it mean to be a Christian is addressed to the single individual. And the individual cannot inherit the answer from the collective or delegate it to the collective. He must answer it with his or her own existence. So the answer can only come in the form of an existential transformation of the single individual. So what special and unique message do you think Kierkegaard as a Christian writer has for us today in a pluralistic society? I would like to highlight two aspects of Kierkegaard as a Christian writer. I think these two aspects are in a creative tension. The first aspect is that Kierkegaard is really a thinker who goes ad fontes, he goes to the sources, to the sources of Christianity in this case and that means first and foremost exploring the Bible. And so when we read Kierkegaard we see that he's a thinker who is an avid reader of the Bible. He's a very attentive reader. He has great imagination and he reads the Bible in a very creative way. So he plunges into the psychology of the Biblical figures and explores their inner struggles. He invents alternatives to biblical stories and lets the reader compare them to the original. He plays for a long time with one sentence and analyzing each of its words and their potential meanings. So, as readers we're often surprised how much we discover through Kierkegaard's interpretations of the Bible. And the second aspect which I would like to highlight is that Kierkegaard always brings the Bible into productive dialogue with non-christian sources. So what example can you give for how Kierkegaard brings the Bible into a dialogue with other sources. I think there are many examples of this in his works, both the published works and in his journals and papers. But, I would like to mention one example, which is the pseudonymous work, Fear and Trembling. As we know, in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard plays or elaborates on the Biblical motif of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, which is a story taken from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. But interestingly enough he does not, he does not explore this story with the help of Christian sources and Christian authors. In fact, he draws on a relatively broad variety of non-christian sources. He, borrows motifs from the Greek poet Homer, from the Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides. He refers to the ancient historians Livy and Plutarch and refers to the ideas of Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. So I think that what we can learn from Kierkegaard today is exactly this importance of solid knowledge of one's own tradition and its principal sources, and the bringing of this tradition into productive philosophical dialogue with sources from other traditions. One of the few friends that Kierkegaard had throughout his life was a man named Emil Boesen. He recalled the importance of Kierkegaard's masters thesis for the philosopher's later development, explaining, quote, "It was... most probably while Kierkegaard was writing The Concept of Irony... that he first gained a clear understanding of what he himself wanted to do and what his abilities were." Boesen seems to suggest that there was something about Kierkegaard's work in this context that helped him to decide to be an author, and helped him to find out specifically what kind of an author he wanted to be. What was this? Much evidence supports the claim that it was Socrates who was the key for Kierkegaard. Indeed, all the points that we've touched on here were important for him in one way or another. Aporia, the sophists, the gadfly, the daimon, maieutics and, of course, Socrates' irony. In many of the most important works of the authorship Kierkegaard returns to the figure of Socrates. Socrates is discussed at some length in the Philosophical Fragments as a form of learning that's contrasted to Christianity. Likewise, reference is made to Socrates in the satirical work Prefaces from 1844. A large section of Kierkegaard's famous book, Stages on Life's Way, entitled In vino veritas is modeled on Plato's dialogue, The Symposium. Throughout Kierkegaard's edifying discourses Socrates is referred to indirectly as the simple wise man of old. Socrates also appears in scattered passages of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Moreover, he is discussed in connection with the theory of love in Kierkegaard's book, Works of Love. Kierkegaard also has one of his pseudonymous authors invoke Socrates explicitly in the Sickness unto Death as an alternative to the modern age. Finally, Socrates is mentioned as a kind of model for Kierkegaard in the final issue of The Moment, shortly before Kierkegaard's death. Kierkegaard recognized some problems in his own day in nineteenth century Denmark that were analogous to the problems that confronted the Greeks in the fifth century BC. Moreover, human nature being what it is, he recognized many of his own contemporaries in the figures that are portrayed in the dialogues of Plato. Kierkegaard hit upon the idea that what was needed in his own time was a new Socrates. By this, he meant, not someone who would come up with a new philosophy or a new doctrine but rather someone who would disturb and provoke people. Someone who would shake them from their complacency. This was the goal that he decided to set for himself. He would become the new Socrates, the Socrates of Copenhagen.
