No, Socrates is the only person who solved the problem: he took everything, everything, with him to the grave. Marvelous Socrates,... you kept the highest enthusiasm closed up airtight in the most eminent reflection and sagacity, kept it for eternity¾you took everything along. Therefore the professors are disparagingly saying of you now¾O, Socrates!¾that, after all, you were only a personality, that you did not even have a system.
Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers (IV 4303, 224)
There are indeed, as those concerned with the mysteries say, many who carry the thyrsus but the Bacchants are few.
Socrates in the Phaedo (69c-d)
I. Introduction
In this paper I seek to capture an image of Socrates, the “single individual,” as he exists in Plato’s Phaedo. This existing Socrates, I shall conclude “unconcludingly,” is existentially analogous to the Abraham of Fear and Trembling, authored by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio; thus I hope to reveal Socrates in the Phaedo as a “Knight of Faith.”
To this end I shall first consider the picture of Socrates rendered by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. In fact these two works present two, existentially distinct Socrateses. In the former Socrates represents an orthodox rendering of Plato’s epistemology of recollection; this Socrates is a Knight of Infinite Resignation but not of Faith. In the latter, however, Climacus presents Socrates as an exemplar of “Religiousness A”¾“pagan” or “Socratic faith”¾as distinct from “Religiousness B,” which refers to Christian faith. The pagan faith of Religiousness A is also the faith of Abraham, Fear and Trembling’s “Knight of Faith,” and, as I hope to indicate, of Socrates in the Phaedo. *
Thus I shall first give a brief account of Johannes Climacus's characterization of the Platonic and religious Socrateses, as set forth, respectively, in Fragments and Postscript. Second I shall observe Socrates’s unconcluding argumentation in the Phaedo, from which we can infer the presence not of a Platonic “systematizer” but of an existing philosopher. Third I shall extend my consideration of the Phaedo to include its more poetic elements in order to flesh out this existing Socrates. Finally, I shall compare the existential postures of Socrates and Abraham in order to justify each as a Knight of Faith.
In Fragments, Climacus invokes the "Platonic Socrates" as merely the "occasion" for knowledge, as distinct from the "decisive" appearance of the eternal in time which alone gives the "condition" of faith and truth¾that “subjectivity is untruth.” The significance of this "condition" is not that of radical doubt or presuppositionlessness, a logically necessary point of departure which dispels all deception in order to assure the rational certainty of the philosophical "system"; rather, this condition is the transcendent telos of human existence and the truth of subjectivity. In Fragments Socrates himself is merely the occasion for the awareness of subjective untruth, but this is not the decisive “subjectivity is untruth” of Postscript because in Fragments Socrates is the occasion for the recollective recovery of objective truth, which entirely swallows subjectivity: recollection presupposes that only by gathering the soul to itself and out of the bodily world¾a radical subjective withdrawal¾can one achieve truth. Recollection thus tempts one toward speculative thought and away from the truth that subjectivity is untruth—the truth of subjectivity itself.
The "Socratic Socrates" of Postscript, however, though still shadowed by recollection, resists the Platonic temptation of recollection’s speculative solace rather to exist: "Socrates essentially emphasizes existing, whereas Plato, forgetting this, loses himself in speculative thought” (CUP 205). Socrates lacks both the condition of the historical God in time and the decisive category of sin, which together would block all recourse to the speculative path back to objective "truth”; thus it must be the vocation of this existing Socrates continually to "annul" recollection in order to actualize himself. Further, where the object of Socratic faith is the paradox of the immortality of the soul, this paradox is not an absolute paradox, because it derives only from the relation of the eternal to the particular existing person; it is not paradoxical in itself as is the actual existing, in the moment¾the Øjeblik¾of the eternal in time. In brief, we distinguish the metaphysical Socrates of Fragments from the existing, religious Socrates of Postscript while recognizing that Socrates is not a Christian; thus this Socrates is an exemplar of Religiousness A. The metaphysical cleaves to objective truth, which annuls subjectivity altogether; Religiousness B is the domain of absolute subjectivity and freedom because the absolute, objective paradox forecloses entirely the temptation to objective truth; Religiousness A is the domain of subjectivity which yet remains tempted by objective truth.
Climacus remarks in Postscript that “Socrates was an ethicist but, please note, bordering on the religious” (CUP 503) and he continues, “Just as an analogy to faith is to be found in him, so an analogy to hidden inwardness can also be found, except that externally he expressed this only by negative action, by abstaining, and thus contributed to drawing the attention of others to it” (CUP fn. 504), thus detracting, according to Climacus, from his religiosity; in short, Socrates is merely "an analogue to faith" (CUP 205). Yet for Climacus such pagan spirituality is genuinely religious, whereas the Christianity of Christendom is decidedly irreligious:
If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol¾where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshipping an idol (CUP 201).
Here the idol the pagan worships is merely an occasion for genuine worship of God, whereas the “Christian” of Christendom effectively makes an idol of the Cross. Throughout Kierkegaard’s writings, Socrates is primarily an exemplar of the highest form of spirituality in paganism: in the signed discourses Kierkegaard frequently uses sobriquets of the form “that wise old man” to refer to him in religious terms. This is a Socrates absolutely invested in himself, absolutely concerned, and this portrait of a man at risk we see in the Phaedo.
In characterizing the Socrates of the Phaedo as a Knight of Faith, it will be critical to remain clear on the precise task that Socrates has as a human being existing in the inwardness of existential pathos. We must see his faith as residing not in recollection but in repetition: his task is not epistemological but existential. This task is essentially, in Climacus's terms, to deny the speculative project, to resist the temptation of objective "truth" in favor of the proposition that "subjectivity is truth." As I have indicated above, this task demands that "subjectivity is untruth" in the sense that there is no objective truth for the existing human being, and the truth of existing is the maintenance of this conviction. This task, however, bears a perilous resemblance to the speculative stance of doubt, which would be a task worthy of a Knight of Infinite Resignation but not yet one of Faith; Johannes de Silentio himself identifies Socrates as an "intellectual" version of such a Knight in Problema II of Fear and Trembling. This by itself is not a problem, since the movement of infinite resignation is a necessary condition for the movement of faith; but this is also not enough. For my purposes, I must also point in the direction of Socrates's own movement of faith, as Johannes de Silentio does for Abraham. We must recall that faith cannot rely on demonstration or proof, for then it would not be faith; and I shall argue that in the Phaedo Socrates implicitly refuses and explicitly revokes such reliance. Socrates’s faith, like Abraham's, rests not on demonstration but on conviction.
For Socrates this conviction is his life, which cleaves to ignorance, to subjective untruth, at the risk of life. Thus, though his conviction is subjective, it is conviction, a clinging to truth¾the truth that subjectivity is untruth, which is not possible without the self and which thus invests the self with positive meaning. The task is thus not merely a withdrawal from or denial of the self, for the truth that “subjectivity is untruth” is true only for the self and exists only by virtue of the self¾this is the truth of subjectivity. This task represents a repetition, which here manifests itself as an irremediable dialectic¾as distinct from mediated Hegelian dialectic¾wherein truth and untruth recognize each other without overcoming or surpassing one another and without apparent progress. The truth of the self is continuous novelty¾objectively speaking a paradox, since truth must by nature be “eternal”; the self remains the same untruth, yet so to remain demands the continuous rediscovery of the truth of untruth, which for Socrates takes the form of his peculiar brand of “unconcluding” philosophical discourse. And this is his task¾the philosophical life itself¾which he exhibits performatively throughout the Phaedo and which, in his entreaty against misology, he explicitly defends.
III. Socrates Arguing
In the Phaedo, there are two arguments for the immortality of the soul, two objections to which Socrates responds and, precisely at the geographical and, as I shall suggest in the next section, the existential center of the dialogue, Socrates's entreaty against misology.
Socrates's first argument is a "composite" argument. It begins by considering the generation of opposite "things" as distinct from opposite "forms." In the same way that pleasure passes into pain, so too one into the other pass life and death. These are processes of becoming in which concrete contradictory experiences are seamlessly connected. The generation of each from its opposite must be a cyclical process wherein these opposites continually balance one another. If one side of each pair tended to overcome the other¾if the process rather took the form of a straight line¾then "all things would ultimately have the same form, be affected in the same way, and cease to become" (72b). Specifically, if all life tended toward death, without the countervailing process of death becoming again life, then one would have to conclude that all things would eventually be "absorbed in death" (72d). The argument rests on the empirical fact that all that is comes to be and passes away¾that it is only becoming that is; and, since the condition for the possibility of the maintenance of becoming is its cyclical balance, life can only derive from death.
The second component of the "composite argument" is a variation on the doctrine of recollection, but Cebes, and not Socrates, "reminds us" of this theory and puts it forth. Then Simmias steps in: he does not doubt the theory, he says, “but I want to experience the very thing we are discussing, recollection, and from what Cebes undertook to say, I am now remembering and am pretty nearly convinced” (73b). Thus recalled by Cebes and experienced by Simmias, Socrates goes on to extend the theory logically toward the theory of forms. This argument establishes the pre-existence of the soul based on our common epistemological experience whereby we refer the objects of perceptual apprehension to the forms according to the deficiency in the things we perceive: we could only perceive such deficiency if our souls previously possessed knowledge of the forms in which the things we perceive are deficient. This pre-existence is thus tied logically to the existence of the forms: if the latter are given, then the soul exists before we are born, because only thereby can we justify empirical knowledge.
Socrates proceeds to bind the two arguments together, and he seems willing to rest in the dubious satisfaction that he has thereby proven both the existence of the soul before life and its continuation after death: if the soul must have existed before its present life, and if there must be a cyclical balance between the living and the dead whereby "every living thing comes from the dead" (77 c), then what else could become of the soul after death but that it should be reborn?
The second argument for the immortality of the soul is a direct response to the objection of Cebes that the soul might, like a cloak, survive many bodies without necessarily being perpetual¾that the epistemological foundation of the doctrine of recollection addresses only the pre-existence of the soul and not its perpetuity. Socrates prefaces his response with the recollection of his youthful disappointment in the study of Anaxagoras's physical philosophy: Anaxagoras had fallen back upon the physical elements, rather than consider the "true causes" according to the tendency of Mind to realize itself as "what is best" (97d). Of such philosophers Socrates remarks, “As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they believe that they will sometime discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together more, and they do not believe that the truly good and ‘binding’ binds and holds them together” (99c). Under Anaxagoras Socrates had been forced to settle for "second best,” and he seeks now to confront causation directly¾as a matter of personal conviction: it is not by virtue of his "bones and sinews" that he remains in Athens to face his execution, but rather "that I have chosen the best course" because "I act with my mind" (99a). This recalls a remark by Climacus, that rather than fool with astronomy, “that old master Socrates did the opposite: he gave up astronomy and chose the higher and more difficult thing: before the god to understand himself” (CUP 469). Notably, Socrates’s personal enthusiasm for the equation of causation and “the best” invests the discussion with an ethical-religious dimension; indeed, Socrates now determines himself to seek “true cause” in the forms, now not in becoming but in being, and this will require a movement of faith.
Socrates begins by observing that we experience pleasure with reference to pain, and define them relationally; but does the mediation of opposition, which we experience empirically, apply to the forms in their incorporeal purity? Socrates claims that it does not: forms do not admit their opposites. Here, says Socrates, we are dealing with "the opposites themselves," while previously we had determined only that "an opposite thing came from an opposite thing" (103b). But Socrates will only approach this matter indirectly; he has learned to fear "that my soul would be altogether blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses" (99e). He will resort to images of things, to words, and he will assume the existence of the forms and "hope to show you the cause as a result" (100b). Here is the movement of faith: to confront true cause demands simultaneously that he turn his back to it, as he will be doubly removed from the forms, dealing with them as images of images. Further, he explicitly declines to confront the "third-man" problems of the Parmenides and the Sophist-- "I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all things are beautiful by the Beautiful" (100d); he explicitly declines to consider the process of causation itself. So, the argument goes, forms do not admit their opposites: fire cannot admit coldness and still remain fire but recedes before it. Further, particular instances of forms bring the characteristic of the form along with them: the number 3 excludes evenness just as emphatically as oddness itself, while not itself being opposite to the number 2. Thus, we can conclude that an "instance" of life, the soul, brings life along with it to the exclusion of death, and is thus "deathless." Finally, as the "uneven" is indestructible, so too must be an instance of it that necessarily brings it along, the number 3. So as the "deathless" is indestructible¾"for," Cebes affirms, "hardly anything could resist destruction if the deathless, which lasts forever, would admit destruction" (106d)¾so too must be the soul.
Socrates began his consideration of the immortality of the soul by moving from things to forms: “it is definitely from the equal things, though they are different from that Equal, that you have derived and grasped equality?” he asked rhetorically (74c). In this last argument he reverses direction to move from forms to things, to the immortal soul itself. Evidently Socrates has been operating simultaneously in both aesthetic and religious dimensions; and in the end, having been tempted and disappointed by the science of Mind, he has chosen the religious. We might recall the two, qualitatively distinct qualities of pleasure and pain, and the contrariety of their experiences, which Phaedo and Socrates experience, respectively, at the beginning of the dialogue: as his chains are removed, Socrates remarks that, though (physical) pleasure and pain are evidently indissolubly linked, “a man cannot have both at the same time” (60b), while Phaedo has already revealed that he personally was feeling “an unaccustomed mixture" of (spiritual) pleasure and pain (59a). This double-ambiguity foreshadows both the logical paradoxes to follow, and the incommensurability of both logical and personal separation which mark the dialogue¾between Socrates and his interlocutors, between pre-existence and perpetuity, between being and becoming. The first argument rests upon a synthesis of forms derived from empirical experience and the cyclical process of becoming, and Socrates is prepared to rest upon it even as he abandons it with the fear of a “scattered” soul (Cf. 78b). The second argument, which directly invokes the a priori¾the forms in their immutable and incorporeal purity¾is hypothetical in form and logically circular in content, and rather than establish the perpetuity of the soul, it comes closer to putting into question its very being.
Between his two, irreconcilable arguments Socrates clings to the paradoxical demands of the philosophical life. In his response to the objection of Simmias that the soul is a harmony, Socrates is not content, as is Simmias, to dispense with the argument on the basis of the apparent epistemological necessity of recollection; he insists rather that harmony is inconsistent with the fact that some souls are good and others evil on the basis of the actions of their possessors. If the soul were a harmony, then all would be harmonized and equally good; but the soul directs the body and some souls direct theirs better than others. What is important ultimately is that all souls equally are souls (93a-e), but each is alone in existence.
IV. Socrates Existing
Phaedo remarks, before he presents his recollection of Socrates's final argument, that "Plato, I believe, was ill” (59b), which isolates Socrates as a distinct individual, leaving him with two interlocutors without developed philosophical positions of their own; thus he proceeds with a personal earnestness commensurate with the pathos of his predicament. Witness his determined posture as the discussion of the putative immortality of the soul begins: as he makes the ironic suggestion that the itinerant Sophist Evenus would surely be willing, as a philosopher, to follow Socrates into death, Socrates "put his feet on the ground, and remained in this position during the rest of the conversation" (61c-d). Later he says, "I do not think… that anyone who heard me now, not even a comic poet, could say that I am babbling and discussing things that do not concern me, so we must examine the question seriously, if you think we should do so" (70b-c). The first part of this remark emphasizes the existential stake for Socrates personally, but the final phrase reflects back upon his young interlocutors and on us: the real commitment must be theirs, and ours, as Socrates withdraws himself even as he acknowledges his personal risk, a ploy reminiscent of the double-reflection of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses, where he withdraws himself with a disclaimer of authority to demand the personal engagement of “my reader.” It is noteworthy that, in responding to the urging of Echecrates to “tell us every detail” of Socrates’s death, Phaedo opens with an account of his own feelings, which indicates that, while the direct focus of the dialogue is on the existence of Socrates, the ultimate purpose, which can be achieved only indirectly, is to deflect our attention from Socrates to Phaedo, to Simmias and Cebes and to ourselves.
The dramatic and existential centerpiece of the dialogue is the entreaty against misology. Rigorous argument and sincere reflection will not resolve themselves, as we have seen, so it cannot have been Socrates's concern to persuade others by means of argument. This demands the entreaty, and in a dramatic break from his otherwise indirect account, Phaedo directly relates Socrates’s solemn admonition:
We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those of you who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. For I am thinking¾see in how contentious a spirit¾that if what I say is true, it is a fine thing to be convinced; if, on the other hand, nothing exists after death, at least for this time before I die I shall distress those present less with lamentations and my folly will not continue to exist along with me.... If you take my advice, Simmias and Cebes, you will give but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think that what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument and take care that in my eagerness I do not deceive myself and you and, like a bee, leave my sting in you when I go (91 a-c).
Again we glimpse Socrates’s movement of faith¾“it’s a fine thing to be convinced.” His essential emphasis is that "the unexamined life is not worth living," for it is his own transparency to himself that primarily concerns him, and it is this concern that he urges upon Simmias and Cebes. He does not expect or even seek objective agreement, but he does forwardly reject sophistic triumphalism, and by emphasizing his own conviction, he chooses subjective decision in defiance of objective truth. Further, Socrates here gently but firmly repulses his listeners from concern for him toward their own, inward concern for themselves, which Socrates cannot accomplish with direct, logical discourse.
In the Apology, we get as close as we might to a direct encounter with the existing Socrates: there he presents himself as he has lived, in pursuit of the oracle, recounting his discovery, in ignorance, of wisdom. In his speech, Socrates persists in the same practice that landed him in court, preferring his accustomed style to the oratorical art: Lysias had proffered a speech for him to deliver in his defense, which Socrates praised as “beautiful and well-composed,” but Socrates decided rather to present himself in his common garb, as Kierkegaard explains:
In the first place he meant: My life is too earnest to be served by the prop of an orator's technique. I have ventured my life; even if I am not sentenced to death, I have ventured my life, and in the service of the god I have done my duty.... In the second place, he meant: The thoughts, ideas, and concepts that I, known by everyone, ridiculed by your comic poets, regarded as an eccentric, daily attacked by "the anonymous"...¾these thoughts are my life, have occupied me early and late.... If I were to have twenty years again, I would just keep on talking about the same things I have been talking about continually (FSE 9-10).
It is precisely this life, of Socrates the single individual, of which the Phaedo offers a glimpse, thus Socrates's entreaty against misology is the real Socratic apology: it constitutes a defense of his own existence¾of the philosophical life for which Socrates, to the end, has "ventured" his. As we have observed, the importance of this entreaty is indicated dramatically by its location precisely at the center of the dialogue, separating becoming from being, pre-existence from perpetuity, in the gap between which Socrates exists. Crucial also is its manner of presentation, particularly in light of the layers of indirectness typical of Platonic dialogues: Phaedo recounts that Socrates addressed this entreaty directly to him, as Socrates stroked his hair (89b), and it is presented in direct response to the objections of Simmias and Cebes, whose arguments Socrates undermines but whose own self-examination Socrates implores.
The occasion to urge this legacy upon his young successors is his final venture. This legacy is that when existing human beings engage in matters incommensurable with existence, their earnest argumentation will inevitably lead to contradiction and paradox; and, as Climacus puts it in Fragments, “paradox is the passion of thought.... But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall.... This, then is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think” (PF 37). This is precisely the quest of Socrates in the Phaedo. As we advance in argument, the greater the temptation will be to achieve determinate resolution and certainty by conflating the incommensurable realms of being and thought; but to exist is to cleave to this incommensurability, which demands increasing earnestness and risks misological despair. Socrates's task is thus to maintain himself in the contradictions to which his arguments lead him, in the contradictions that human existence is. Socrates is no teacher, he seeks not the agreement of those with whom he speaks; he rather repels his interlocutors from himself into themselves. It is thus that Kierkegaard, in his primary occupation as an unauthorized author of upbuilding discourses, is himself a Socrates. In a Journal entry from 1850, Kierkegaard gives a glimpse of the significance of Socrates as a religious figure while simultaneously distinguishing him radically from Christianity: “Christ says: Come unto me all of you—but on the other hand he uses such means to repel that the effect is that everyone flees.... A man, Socrates, who understood that if he had invited all, just about everybody would have fled, a man, Socrates, therefore changes the invitation and talks about the single individual” (JP III 3683, 705).
It is the stated goal of the philosophical life to "purify" the soul (cf. 67b), for the sake of its after-life, by withdrawing it from the perpetual error of sensual becoming. Yet the actual possession of such aesthetic purity would condemn one to a concrete determinateness that would end the philosophical life itself. And it is this, even in the after-life, to which Socrates most looks forward, in the Apology, for example, where he expresses the hope that he will find himself after death discoursing with the greatest of his predecessors. Thus, ironically, it is the embodied soul that seems most to concern Socrates, and throughout the Phaedo he seems to fall into perplexity concerning the relation of body and soul. At the beginning of the arguments, as we have seen, Socrates plants his feet firmly on the floor in a show of bodily earnestness; yet his soul is not so planted, as he enters into the proof of its immortality only upon the clear urging of Simmias and Cebes¾on their behalf he agrees to discuss it "if you think we should" (70b-c). Then Socrates apparently commits himself to a "composite" argument that purports to fuse form and physis (77c-d). Later Socrates recalls his youthful concern that his soul would be blinded by the sight of his eyes as the reason for his turning from physical to dialectical investigations (99e). And though the soul’s immortality hangs in the balance throughout, he can confirm, ironically, that his “bones and sinews” are “deathless” (80d). The most notable feature of the Phaedo, however, is the continual, hypothetical resort to the “composite” doctrine of recollection and forms, with the unwavering concurrence of both Simmias and Cebes; but this doctrine is at all times merely a presupposition that itself escapes direct scrutiny. It is invoked as the condition of possibility for human knowledge and serves logically to propel the discussion, but it is not the object of Socratic faith; indeed, to it Socrates offers no direct acquiescence. Early in the dialogue, as he offers the orthodox account of why the philosopher should not resent death, Socrates stipulates, “if we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself” (66d-e); this is the very basis of the theory of recollection, yet Socrates goes no farther in its defense than to say, “Such are the things, Simmias, that all those who love learning in the proper manner must say to each other and believe. Or do you not think so?” (67b). Later, Socrates can do no more than offer, hypothetically, that the theories of recollection and forms share “an equal necessity” (76e), to which Simmias lends his personal endorsement¾“Nothing is so evident to me personally as that such things must certainly exist” (77a); indeed, it is Simmias’s faith in recollection that permits him unhesitatingly to abandon his aesthetic attachment to the “attunement” theory (92c-d). Finally, Socrates’s expectation of an afterlife is to him no certainty: he can say only, “I have good hope that some future awaits men after death, as we have been told for years, a much better future for the good than for the wicked” (63c).
In a Journal entry from 1850 Kierkegaard writes, with an echo of Pascal’s wager, “Socrates could not prove the immortality of the soul. He simply said: This matter occupies me so much that I will live my life as if there were an immortality¾should there not be any, all right, I will not regret my choice, for this subject is the only thing that occupies me” (JP IV 4280, 214). Indeed, at the conclusion of his arguments in the Phaedo, Socrates repeats his earlier reservations, acknowledging that “our first hypotheses require clearer examination, even though we find them convincing” (107b), he refers to the immortality of the soul only in conditional terms (107c) and he insists only “that the soul appears to be immortal” (107d), as he embarks on the soul's mythological journey through the underworld. Notwithstanding this implicit “revocation” (cf. CUP 619), however, there is a qualitative difference between having existed in constant contradiction and not having existed at all (cf. CUP 621). To this end, Socrates has gone so far, in his final days, to try his hand at poetry, putting into question even whether his dreams’ direction to “practice and cultivate the arts” refers narrowly or exclusively to philosophy (60e-61a). Indeed it is the poetic narrative of his life that is the object of faith for Socrates, not the epistemological stillness of philosophic death. Ironically, this means that Socrates's discussion takes the form of a recollection, a justification of philosophical life as an unconcluding quest, an openness to the tension of incompleteness. As to whether Socrates’s faith has been true, whether he is an authentic “Bacchant,” he can say only, “I have in my life left nothing undone in order to be counted among these as far as possible, as I have been eager to be in every way. Whether my eagerness was right and we accomplished anything we shall, I think, know for certain in a short time, god willing, on arriving yonder” (69d).
In his treatment of Religiousness A, Climacus remarks that “examination... goes backward: the task is given to the individual in existence, and just as he... wants to begin, another beginning is discovered to be necessary, the beginning of the enormous detour that is dying to immediacy” (CUP 526). We have been observing Socrates resisting the speculative temptation to ground himself determinately in recollection, and we are about to see that Abraham resists an analogous temptation, in the opposite direction. Their analogous existential postures bring them together as belonging to Religiousness A: each is a Knight of Faith.
V. Socrates and Abraham, Unconcluding
In the Introduction I promised an image of Socrates, Knight of Faith, as he exists in the Phaedo, which I hope I have fulfilled. This does not amount to a description of “the historical Socrates”: an historical entity, as Kierkegaard would be the first to remind us, cannot exist because it is a concluded thing; the “single individual” does not conclude any more than do Socrates’s arguments. Thus, in lieu of a conclusion, I offer the following unconcluding comparison of Socrates and Abraham as Knights of Faith.
Both lack the condition of sin, the lesson of the god-man who is alone without sin and whose presence is the condition of redemption from sin. Had Socrates been able to acknowledge sin, he would have been categorically prevented from resort to recollection: if the soul exists in sin, then it is denied recollective resource to purity. Thus Socrates remains tempted by the past; by contrast, Abraham’s temptation lies in the future. One might see Socrates’s orientation to pre-existence, as opposed to Abraham’s toward the future, as a decisive difference; however, recall that Climacus, in the “Interlude” of Fragments (PF 72-88), propounds the essential point that both future and past belong equally not to necessity but to possibility, and it is precisely the temptation of the logical certainty of necessity, in favor of existential possibility, that concerns us here. Thus where Socrates is tempted to rest in the certainty that recollection promises, Abraham is tempted to anchor his existence in the promise of the future of the race.
We have seen, if we posit the object of Socrates's faith to be the immortality of the soul, that its paradox consists only in its relation to temporal existence. Similarly for Abraham, his infinite interest in Isaac, the necessary condition for absolute sacrifice, exists only in relation to the temporal promise that Isaac represents. The paradox of each situation is a function of the subjective inwardness of Religiousness A¾to maintain one's faith in the totality of subjective uncertainty in the face of the temptation of objective certitude. In his Journals from 1850, Kierkegaard explicitly distinguishes the faith of Abraham from Christian faith, suggesting the distinction between Religiousnesses A and B. “That there is a difference between the absurd in Fear and Trembling and the paradox in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is quite correct. The first is the purely personal definition of existential faith¾the other is faith in relation to a doctrine” (JP I 11, 8). Kierkegaard goes on to describe the absurd of Religiousness A, as distinct from the objective paradox of Religiousness B, as “the negative criterion of that which is higher than human knowledge and understanding,” as distinct from what he would refer to as the “positive” criterion of Christ. Kierkegaard also distinguishes between believing “by virtue of the absurd,” in the case of Abraham, and “to believe the absurd,” which describes Christian faith. Finally, while Abraham is clearly “the father of faith,... it is indeed clear that the content of his faith cannot be Christian¾that Jesus Christ has been in existence. But Abraham’s faith is the formal definition of faith. So it is also with the absurd” (JP I 12, 8). As Abraham represents “the formal definition of faith,” so Socrates, as we have seen, represents “an analogue to faith.”
Aesthetic certitude, which both Socrates and Abraham are constrained to resist, is a temptation because the illusory security of its promise threatens at every moment to vanquish faith. It tempts Socrates in the form of reason; thus it seems in the Crito that Socrates lacks the ethical-religious choice to save his mortal life. Yet in the Phaedo, in considering the "real cause" for his being in prison and facing execution, Socrates rejects the notion that such a cause can be attributed to the physical necessity represented by the orientation of his "bones and sinews": it is rather that "I have chosen the best course" (99a). By this choice Socrates, like Abraham, rises "above the universal" to tread his own, solitary path, and, in light of his proscription of suicide as an offense to the gods (62a-e), this decision must be as dreadful to him as that of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac by his own hand; yet Socrates’s elocution bears no trace of trembling or hesitation. Similarly for Abraham, the command of God raises him above the universal by placing him "in absolute relation to the absolute,” yet the command itself is but an occasion, for his faith consists in the inscrutable solitude of his act: he rises in the morning, saddles the donkeys and bids Sarah good-bye in unbetrayed silence; there is no waver in his resolve. The task of Socrates is to maintain himself in the contradiction between the relative efficacy of argument and its absolute fecklessness, to hold his place in the gap between becoming and being; so Abraham must maintain himself in the contradiction between the (ethical) love that he has for Isaac and his absolute duty to God.
The challenge to Socrates and to Abraham is that each continually gather himself in existence, in the denial of the very certainty that appears to each of them in the directness of the Word. Both Socrates and Abraham are tempted by objective certainty, and their challenge is to reject this certainty for the existential certainty of uncertainty. Certain for Socrates is the uncertainty of his logical conclusions, yet he rejects the jailer's advice to restrain his argumentative fervor¾he will take the poison three times if need be (63e); certain for Abraham is the uncertainty of the promise of Isaac, yet he plods along, for three days at donkeys' pace, on the road to Mt. Moriah. Socrates acts in the constant shadow of his restraining daimon; Abraham acts, with fear and trembling, in patient expectation of God's inscrutable will.
Socrates draws the cup as Abraham raises the knife.
REFERENCES
Climacus, Johannes, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. S. Kierkegaard, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)’ cited as “CUP.”
¾Philosophical Fragments, ed. S. Kierkegaard, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); cited as “PF.”
Kierkegaard, Søren, For Self-Examination, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); cited as “FSE.”
¾Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Vols. I-VII (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978) IV 4303, 224; cited as JP, vol. no., entry no. and page.
Plato, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube, Plato: Complete Works(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).
Silentio, Johannes de, Fear and Trembling, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); cited as “FT.”
Taylor, Mark C., Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
* My subject is Socrates in the Phaedo, thus I shall abstain from direct analysis of Climacus’s categories of religiousness. We must acknowledge, however, that this is an issue of interest and controversy. Mark C. Taylor, for example, offers a notable analysis which identifies the Knight of Infinite Resignation as belonging to Religiousness A and the Knight of Faith to Religiousness B (Taylor 253). I believe Taylor Taylor Taylor ’s perspective, promote the Socrates of Postscript to Knight of Faith (Religiousness A), and (again from Taylor
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