chapter 30

Kierkegaard’s Socratic Way of Writing

David Schur and Lori Yamato

This chapter looks at Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–55) engagement with Socrates

by considering the Danish thinker’s graphomania in the context of Socrates’
silence. Kierkegaard’s reception of Socrates is in an important sense an attempt
to confront the relationship between Socrates’ unpublished investigations and
their written aftermath. Partly as a response to Socrates, Kierkegaard develops
a written legacy that refracts his voice into an excess of self-consciously
constructed perspectives. By creating such an overwhelming proliferation of
self-critical and self-effacing voices, Kierkegaard strives to sustain a distinctly
Socratic attitude of ignorance, an attitude that eschews commitment to fixed
opinions. Although Kierkegaard is at ease calling Socrates “my teacher” (PV
55), the most important Socratic teaching for Kierkegaard is the recognition
of one’s own ignorance, and therefore one’s own lack of authority to teach.
For Kierkegaard, the acknowledgement of ignorance becomes an attitude
of humility and penitence in the face of Christianity. And in Kierkegaard’s
writings, this Socratic ignorance is summed up by his repeated insistence that
he writes “without authority.”
From the time of his earliest works, Kierkegaard emphasizes that Socrates
never speaks to us directly. Socrates, he stresses, remains essentially silent,
reaching us only through second-hand accounts, filtered and distorted
through the written perspectives of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes (CI
9). Kierkegaard writes that “silence” is Socrates’ “whole life in terms of world
history” (CI 11). This sort of silence, the silence of a philosopher who did
not address posterity by speaking for himself in writing, can be understood
to mirror Socrates’ reluctance, recorded in the second-hand accounts, to
speak as a knowledgeable authority. As K. Brian Söderquist succinctly puts it,
“Kierkegaard’s Socrates does not secretly possess the truth—he is genuinely
ignorant, and thus can offer nothing to replace the illusions he dispels” (2013,
352–3). If we accept Socrates’ claims to ignorance, then they are substantiated
by his reluctance to fix his opinions in written form.
Rather than remain unpublished, Kierkegaard emulates Socrates by
writing like Plato. The way that Kierkegaard drowns out his own authority in a
maelstrom of voices owes much to Plato’s way of writing about Socrates. It is
an approach to writing that radically renounces authority by submerging and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396753_032

Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 821

disguising the author’s voice. Plato does this in a variety of ways. To take a prime
example, Plato never speaks for himself in the first person in the dialogues
that he wrote. His Socrates, meanwhile, is what we today would call a literary
character, a figure who speaks in the writings of someone else, a screen behind
which the historical Socrates remains mute. In addition, Plato’s Socrates is
extraordinarily self-critical, and when he does provide an extended explanation
of an important matter, as in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, it is itself
often presented as a hand-me-down account. Socrates’ missing footprint gives
way to a stampede of printed utterances in Plato’s dialogues, so to speak, but
however much we may expect or desire this Socrates’ speeches to be replete
with answers, he is resolutely inconclusive. Plato’s version of Socrates is not
only relentless in his search for answers but also extraordinarily hesitant about
accepting them. Thus Plato’s dialogues strike a peculiar balance between
Socratic silence and speech, and this confluence of humility and relentless
questioning heavily informs Kierkegaard’s writings.
In his attempt to write in the wake left by Socrates’ absence, Kierkegaard
confronts questions that continue to puzzle modern academic philosophers:
How might one disentangle an authentic Socrates from writings about rather
than by Socrates? And how are we to understand Plato’s use of the dialogue
form, in which Socrates is a character who seems to diffuse Plato’s own voice
of authority? But instead of simply wrestling with the extant written record,
which Kierkegaard does explicitly do in his early dissertation on irony, he ends
up adding to it and adding himself to it. Although he often adapts strategies of
authorship from Plato in order to sustain a Socratic mission, Kierkegaard tends
to bypass Plato’s role as a crucial mediator, so that Kierkegaard does not so
much imitate Plato as supersede him in a first-order effort to create an ongoing
Socratic (rather than Platonic) enterprise.1 The book Stages on Life’s Way
(1845), which will be considered in more depth below, is a telling case in point;
it contains a complex restaging of Plato’s Symposium that effectively writes
the (already-absent) figure of Plato out of the picture. Kierkegaard replaces
Plato as the absent authorial voice that brings Socratic dialogue to life. Formal
structures such as pseudonymity and fictional narrative thus assist Kierkegaard
in creating a unique, visionary, and revisionary incarnation of Socrates in
writing.2 Such structures distance Kierkegaard from his publications, so that he

1  Edward F. Mooney has observed a Socratic motivation in Kierkegaard’s adaptation of stylistic

tactics found in Plato, tactics that allow for the “unanchoring” of authored statements from
the strictures of authoritative, “credentialed testimony” (2007, 21–24).
2  See Pedersen’s discussion of strategic, contradictory “procedures” that Kierkegaard often uses
as part of a “movement toward ‘authorial’ effacement” (1989, 101–2).
822 Schur and yamato

resembles Socrates in his absence from the written record, Plato in his absence
from the Platonic dialogues—and Socrates in his reluctance to make claims
to knowledge in Plato’s dialogues.3 And insofar as Kierkegaard’s authorship
may be viewed as a totality, more extreme instances of distancing, such as
the pile-up of voices and narrative levels in Stages, contribute to his general
movement away from a direct and expository position of authority in all of his
writings.

1 Authorship

The idea of an “authorship”—a carefully and strategically curated legacy

of published writings—is crucial to Kierkegaard and utterly foreign to
Socrates. The contrast can help us to understand Kierkegaard’s reception of
Socrates because Kierkegaard gives so much weight to writing per se. After
all, Socrates was by no means silent when he was alive; if anything, he was
unusually and perhaps fatally vocal. But because Kierkegaard is viewing
Socrates from the position of a committed writer, he reads the earlier thinker’s
disinclination to publish as a profound and exemplary gesture of negativity.
Kierkegaard did not simply write a great deal—materials now collected
and categorized as published and posthumous, signed and pseudonymous,
as books, journals, letters, and papers; he also conducted many of his most
significant interactions with other people—including courtship, polemical
arguments, and correspondence with publishers—by means of writing; and
he also paid special attention to the reception of his writings.4 As early as 1842,
not long after completing his first major piece of writing, his dissertation on
The Concept of Irony (1841), he labeled a collection of his personal letters to a
friend, requesting that they be burned and adding a note “For the information
of posterity” about their worthlessness (Garff 2005, 200). The hyper-awareness
of future readers glimpsed in this small gesture of self-effacement, enacted

3  See Wolfsdorf 2004 for a discussion of Socratic avowals (and disavowals) of knowledge, and
Press 2000 for a collection of essays concerned with Platonic anonymity. On distance as
a defining aspect of narrative discourse, see Genette 1980 (esp. 162–85) and Stanzel, who
writes, “Mediacy [Mittelbarkeit] is the generic characteristic which distinguishes narration
from other forms of literary art” (1984, 4). See also Schur 2014, 50.
4  Garff brings the terms graphomania and hypergraphia to bear on speculation about
Kierkegaard’s possible epilepsy: “some patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are virtually
possessed by an urge to write” (2005, 458). Kierkegaard himself sometimes seems awed by
an unstoppable, nearly external force: “My literary activity, that enormous productivity, so
intense that it seems to me that it must move stones, single portions of which not one of my
contemporaries is able to compete with, to say nothing of its totality …” (PV 168).
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 823

precisely by writing for posterity, blossomed into Kierkegaard’s conception of

authorship ( forfatterskab, forfattervirksomhed), which is a major focus in such
writings as On My Work as an Author (1851) and the posthumously published
book The Point of View for My Work as an Author; not to mention numerous
prefaces, notes to the reader, and self-consciously crafted, self-conscious asides
from imaginary authors and narrators. In the year of his death, Kierkegaard
wrote that his lifelong reckoning with Christianity was “a Socratic task.” At
the same time, it is evident that Kierkegaard’s task was carried out, first and
foremost, by way of writing.5 As Kierkegaard puts it in a note “Concerning the
Writings on My Work as an Author”—itself a heading that indicates that the
writer is here writing about his writings about his writings—“Fundamentally,
to be a writer has been my only possibility” (PV 212). When understood,
if mostly retrospectively, as a mission or task, Kierkegaard’s sense of his
authorship recalls Socrates’ divinely sanctioned “mission” described in Plato’s
Apology (23b).
While the terms forfatterskab (authorship) and forfattervirksomhed (work
or activity as an author) would ordinarily mean something much like oeuvre,
Kierkegaard uses them in a more specialized way that has been widely adopted
by scholars. Kierkegaard’s self-conscious usage often puts some emphasis
on the impersonal quality of his own authorship; hence scholars regularly
understand Kierkegaard to be describing something known as the authorship.
Kierkegaard’s distance from his own oeuvre is accompanied by a sense that his
writings are not so much a body of separate texts (the work as an object) as an
ongoing enterprise (the work as an activity). Indeed, Kierkegaard tends to treat
his oeuvre as a whole, as an enterprise that has a religious orientation. To that
end, he excludes certain writings (including the dissertation on irony) from
his authorship and comes to envision a totality of direct (signed) and indirect
(pseudonymous) works that could be read and experienced as a coherent,
if entirely provocative and asystematic, encounter with Christianity. At one
point, Kierkegaard also suggests that “to be an author is and ought to be a work
[Gjerning] and therefore a personal existing” (PV 57), a formulation raising the
possibility that the author’s work or activity, writing, could be a form of living.6
Given Kierkegaard’s general and insistent penchant for contradiction, such
statements do not allow us to distill a fixed doctrine on writing, but they do

5  Quotation from “My Task” (M 352). On the Socratic dimension of Kierkegaard’s Christianity,
see Muench 2006, who focuses on the essay “My Task.” See also Howland 2006.
6  Cf. PV xxii–xxiii: “this little book is not a literary work, but an act.” Kierkegaard’s Danish is
quoted throughout from Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. Cappelørn et al. 1997–.
824 Schur and yamato

help us to identify the range of Kierkegaard’s thinking. The substitution of life

for work is a Socratic undertaking.

2 The Refraction of Authority

Throughout his life as a writer, Kierkegaard understood Socrates in perspectivist

terms, as though the refraction of Socrates’ legacy expressed a corresponding
renunciation of authority. In his 1841 dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with
Continual Reference to Socrates, Kierkegaard spends the first half of this lengthy,
quirky, yet academic study trying to gain an accurate “view” of Socrates’
“position” (Standpunkt) as it may be triangulated from the distorted “views”
left by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes in their writings (CI 9). Kierkegaard
suggests that it is virtually impossible to “fix the picture of him” ( fastholde
Billedet af ham) and even Socrates’ contemporaries misconstrued him, and for
us he is nearly invisible (CI 12). Of course, “we are now separated from him by
centuries,” yet “even his own age could not apprehend him in his immediacy”;
thus Kierkegaard stresses the build-up of perspectival complications: “we
must strive to comprehend an already complicated view by means of a new
combined reckoning” (CI 12). First, Kierkegaard takes the difficulty of reaching
back to Socrates very seriously. Second, Kierkegaard stresses that the reception
of Socrates centers on a figure who was nearly absent and consistently negative
to begin with. It is characteristic of Kierkegaard’s approach to Socrates that
the Greek thinker is only to be glimpsed through telescopic lenses: Socrates as
source is an elusive and silent figure from the start, then reconstructed from
writings in which he was never accurately portrayed.
Having taken stock of the distance bequeathed by Socrates, Kierkegaard
would turn the telescope back on himself for the rest of his life. That is,
Kierkegaard not only observes but also creates a distance between himself and
his legacy, thus actively participating in a Socratic tradition of self-effacement.
Kierkegaard’s self-regarding obsession with perspective and position, with
how readers would look at his own writings, echoes in countless remarks made
throughout his publications, even serving as the title of his later work The Point
of View for My Work as an Author (Synspunket for min Forfatter-Virksomhed).
“From the very beginning,” writes Kierkegaard elsewhere, “I have enjoined and
repeated unchanged that I was ‘without authority.’ I regard myself rather as a
reader of the books, not as the author” (PV 12).7 In a very real sense, Kierkegaard

7  At jeg var »uden Myndighed«, har jeg fra første Øieblik indskærpet og stereotyp gjentaget; jeg
betragter mig selv helst som en Læser af Bøgerne, ikke som Forfatter (SKS 13, 19).
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 825

is presenting himself as a Socratic figure who, reluctant to claim or declaim any

special knowledge, is always keeping his distance. Although the Danish words
used for author (Forfatter) and authority (Myndighed) are not related as they
are in English, Kierkegaard here establishes a clear correspondence between
not being an author and not being an authority. He also playfully suggests that
a writer may act as a reader rather than an author. Insofar as the writer has not
mastered the cruxes of Christianity, he remains no less a student of the topic
than any other reader.8 And for Kierkegaard, this also means being a reader of
himself.

3 Reading through Multiple Lenses

Stages on Life’s Way is a book in which Kierkegaard reads himself and Socrates
at the same time, effectively offering multiple self-critical lenses through
which to consider these two thinkers as writers. Stages on Life’s Way as a whole
flirts with its own literal triviality, comprising three of the most involuted
sections in all of the canon of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication—
each of the sections burrows into itself and into the very nature of the
literary-philosophical endeavor, with imaginary figures inventing further
imaginary figures and old pseudonyms from previous works reappearing as
characters. The book also shies away from making grand pronouncements,
while sticking stubbornly to pointing out problems, felicities, and unexpected
consequences in the way ideas are expressed. Stages on Life’s Way, perhaps
even more than most of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous output, is an exploration
of the limits of language, narrative, and narrative authority. In fact the entire
contrarian project of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way seems to highlight the
gaps and excesses that characterize Kierkegaard’s three different spheres of
life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Subtitled “Studies by Various Persons Compiled, Forwarded to the Press, and
Published by Hilarious Bookbinder”—Stages contains three major studies,
composed by three different imaginary writers, which are introduced by yet
another (Hilarious Bookbinder). The subtitle creates the telescopic effect just
mentioned, by which we are encouraged to view a source through various lenses
that mark its distance from us. These studies have been “compiled,” not even
written, by expressly unnamed figures, then “forwarded,” as though handled

8  For another version of Kierkegaard’s task as one of reading, see the preface to Two Discourses
at the Communion on Fridays, in which he quotes from one of his own pseudonymous works
to make the case for himself as a reader (WA 165).
826 Schur and yamato

at a distance, and then published by a patently invented and ludic character,

whose name “Bookbinder” underscores the impersonal bringing together of
disparate parts into a collection that lacks a unitary source. The book is a tour
de force, a commingling of narrators, characters, and authorial voices in its
commentary on the Socratic/Platonic corpus, most notably in its first major
section, “In Vino Veritas,” which points outward toward other writings (Plato’s
Symposium and earlier Kierkegaard), while also bringing many of Kierkegaard’s
far-flung imaginary voices together at a party. In this process, these narrators
lose authorial autonomy and are treated as characters. To demonstrate the way
that Kierkegaard’s text creates a complex web of interrelationships in its overt
concern with the question of the presentation of Socrates, we will now briefly
consider a remark from a character, Judge William, who seizes authority and
becomes the pseudonymous narrator of the second part of Stages on Life’s Way.
Then we will turn to “In Vino Veritas,” which is modeled on Plato’s Symposium.
As an invented author whose writings reach us by exaggeratedly circuitous
means, Judge William, the narrator of “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer
to Objections by a Married Man” (Adskilligt om Ægteskab mod Indsigelser af
en Æegtemand), exemplifies Kierkegaard’s telescopic focus on the Socratic in
his own writings. Judge William first appears in Stages as a character whose
manuscript has been stolen by another character/narrator and published,
apparently without his knowledge. It is presumably this document that
makes up the “Reflections on Marriage.” Meanwhile, just as saying that Plato’s
Symposium is about love might be thematically accurate but would fail to
observe the effects of Plato’s peculiar structure, these reflections on marriage
seem as interested in the topic of authorial form as in the topic of love. In
fact, Kierkegaard’s text ingeniously pulls apart theme and form in naming
Judge William as the author of the section. It is worth noting that Kierkegaard
plays on the appellation “Married Man” (Ægtemand) as the qualifier for Judge
William’s authority and not, after all, his role as a judge (Assessor). The ægte
in the Danish Ægtemand means “to marry” but its homographically identical
adjective means “real.” William is qualified to talk about marriage as a married
man, but as fictional character-narrator (that is, not a “real” person), his
authority is in doubt.
This dubious authority takes on added resonance as Judge William remarks
on “a few wise men of antiquity,” ostensibly to bolster a claim:

It is told (Man fortæller) that Socrates is supposed to have answered

someone who asked him about marriage: Marry or do not marry—you
will regret both. Socrates was an ironist who presumably concealed his
wisdom and truth ironically lest it become local gossip (Bysnak), but he
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 827

was not a mocker…. If a mocker wants to use the Socratic saying (Ord),
then he acts as if it were a discourse (Tale) and makes it something other
than what it is: namely, a deeply ironic, infinitely wise answer to a foolish
question. By changing the answer to a question into a discourse (Tale),
one can produce a certain crazy comic effect, but one loses the Socratic
wisdom and does violence to the trustworthy testimony that expressly
introduces the story thus: Someone asked him (Socrates) whether one
should marry or not. To which he answered: Whether you do one or the
other, you will regret it.
SLW 156–7

Judge William’s convoluted detour signals the importance of the unwritten,

anecdotal form in which “Socratic wisdom” is transmitted. It serves to remind
us that all Socratic wisdom is anecdotal, unpublished, and thus effectively
unauthorized. Judge William’s explicit concern here is that Socratic speech—
his word (Ord)—is based on an irony directed at the specific stupidity of the
young man who expects a third party to think for him. But Judge William is also
drawing a distinction between reported speech, which may glimpse Socratic
wisdom at a distance, and a more direct but less authentic kind of advice, which
would turn Socrates’ word into “something other than what it is.” William calls
this “something other” a Tale (“discourse” in the Hongs’ translation). According
to William, the essential attribute of the Socratic dialogue, the form of reported
question and answer, is what defines the Socratic and, to take it a step further,
creates the space for Socratic wisdom.
Hence to lose such impersonal, distancing tags as “it is told,” “is supposed to
have answered,” or “someone asked” would be to do “violence,” as Judge William
puts it, to the Socratic dimension of the anecdote. Socratic conversation
is bound up in something like hearsay. Even the anecdote in question here
is presumably drawn from Diogenes Laertius, himself a gossipy compiler of
unnamed sources, an ancient Hilarius Bookbinder.9 Yet despite this structure
of hearsay, Judge William describes how a certain ironic distance can keep
Socratic wisdom from becoming “local gossip.”10 The difference seems to hinge
on maintaining a proper distance from Socrates. By bringing the form of a
Socratic anecdote into the foreground, Judge William functions as an advocate
for mediation, insisting that a Socratic answer is always implicated in a context

9  DL 2.33. It may be helpful to keep in mind that the notion of an anecdote, from Greek,
conveys a sense of being unpublished. Because he is the philosopher who did not publish,
Socrates’ legacy is purely anecdotal.
10  See Fenves 1993 for a consideration of “chatter” throughout the Kierkegaardian corpus.
828 Schur and yamato

of conversational questioning, making Socrates all the more authentic for

being less authoritative.

4 A Symposium with a Missing Socrates

The first major section of Stages on Life’s Way, “In Vino Veritas,” is modeled on
Plato’s Symposium and brings many of Kierkegaard’s imaginary narrators from
other books together at a party. Here Kierkegaard’s vocal signal, the identifiable
stamp of his authority, is scrambled to an extreme. Precisely where we might
expect a Socrates to speak for the author, Kierkegaard hosts a party from
which any obvious figure of Socrates is absent. And as though to underline
the significance of this absence, the narrator describing this party (who is
named William Afham) will eventually erase himself from the fictional world
for which we would normally hold him responsible. While readers usually feel
that Socrates is the central voice in Plato’s Symposium, Kierkegaard’s version
goes beyond Plato to a place where there is no central voice at all.
This place is akin to the specific location in Denmark where “In Vino Veritas”
is set. In some preliminary thoughts from 1843 on what would become this
enigmatic section of Stages (1845), Kierkegaard makes a note in his papers:
“There is a place in Gribs-Skov which is called the Nook of Eight Paths. The
name is very appealing to me” (SKS 18, 169). In the book, the name of this forest
place is the subject of punning elaboration:

Only the one who seeks worthily finds it, for no map indicates it. Indeed,
the name itself seems to contain a contradiction, for how can the
meeting of eight paths create a nook, how can the beaten and frequented
be reconciled with the out-of-the-way and the hidden? And, indeed,
what the solitary shuns is simply named after a meeting of three paths:
triviality—how trivial, then, must be a meeting of eight paths!
SLW 16

The excess of stages, paths, and ways in Stages on Life’s Way puts an emphasis
on being both out of the way and underway. In this case, the nook is a hiding
place, a nearly invisible place from which the story of a banquet can emerge.
The nook serves as a place where ideas can be entertained without being fixed
or mapped. We will not find Kierkegaard, Plato, or Socrates in the nook. The
built-up story borrows from Kierkegaard and Plato even as it buries them
beneath other voices. And Socrates is presumably at the silent center where all
these paths and speakers meet.
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 829

Kierkegaard’s text is superficially quite faithful to its Platonic source in

terms of structure and thematic material. Both texts are nominally dialogues
presented within a narrative frame. And both authors of these symposia retreat
into a cacophony of narrating voices. Kierkegaard’s text, like Plato’s, is largely
taken up by five main male speakers giving speeches concerning love at a
banquet. But Kierkegaard’s is not simply a recasting or updating of Plato’s text.
By focusing on the peculiar build-up of narrators and speakers found in both
texts, and in the dialogue between them, we may observe how Kierkegaard
reconsiders Plato’s Symposium as an attempt to balance ongoing Socratic
investigation—beset by stages, digressions, halts, and hurdles—with the
seeming conclusiveness of a written point of view.
Plato’s text sets up a doubled frame—the outer frame narrator, Apollodorus,
is accosted repeatedly by interlocutors and must correct their assumption that
he had been at a certain symposium with his hero, Socrates. Instead, he offers
an anecdotal account of the symposium that he has had from a participant,
Aristodemus. By the time it is Socrates’ turn to speak, the dialogue is a
vertiginous mise en abyme of hearsay: Apollodorus speaking to an unnamed
companion, recalling an earlier conversation with Glaucon, telling the story
that he heard from Aristodemus, who recounts Socrates’ retelling of Diotima’s
conversation with Socrates. Kierkegaard is faithful to his source, the Platonic
dialogue, by playing on the very obscurity of sources that Plato builds into
his Symposium. If anything, it may at first appear that Kierkegaard honors his
source by excessively mimicking the interpolated chain of speakers. To wit,
we may recall the subtitle for Stages on Life’s Way, “Studies by Various Persons,
Compiled, Forwarded to the Press, and Published by Hilarius Bookbinder.” “In
Vino Veritas,” as one of the “Studies by Various Persons,” comes to us through a
convoluted series of actions—compilation, forwarding, and publication—by
a fictional editor, who is only accidentally an editor, having found the “small
package of handwritten papers” among the books of a newly deceased man who
had left Hilarius Bookbinder a quantity of books to be bound (3). The papers are
posthumous and the writers unknown to the fictional bookbinder-cum-editor.
In fact, the original plan for “In Vino Veritas” was much more closely
modeled on Plato; the text’s main dialogue was to be framed by another
dialogue between a character Albertus and his friend. But Kierkegaard scraps
this plan, noting that “The dialogue form that I had at first wanted to give
the Preliminary to the story cannot be used; it hinders the development, and
finally that friend becomes a superfluous character” (528). By subsuming the
form of “In Vino Veritas” under the singular voice of one narrator (William
Afham), Kierkegaard creates the illusion of intimate, direct contact with
the speakers, speeches, and presumed wisdom of his banquet. This occurs
830 Schur and yamato

in such a way that we almost forget the long chain of hearsay that forms the
entirety of Stages on Life’s Way. The familial relationship Kierkegaard seeks
to form between Plato’s Socrates and his own Socratic writings is established
by means of simultaneous, seemingly contradictory operations carried out
on the Socratic form, multiplications and subtractions aimed at divining the
essentially Socratic in Kierkegaard’s own writings.

5 Recollections of a Non-participant

Kierkegaard’s characteristically and patently contradictory appraisal of the

Socratic perhaps reaches its apotheosis in William Afham’s introduction
to Kierkegaard’s dinner party: “I know very well that I shall not soon forget
that banquet in which I participated without being a participant; but just the
same I cannot now decide to release it without having provided myself with a
scrupulous written apomnêmoneuma [memoir] of what for me was actually
memorabile [worthy of memory]” (15, with the Hongs’s glosses). Kierkegaard
modulates two elements of Plato’s dialogue that distance the reader from the
source of knowledge: “In Vino Veritas” is self-consciously a formally written
(not anecdotal) account created by someone who was there (rather than
being narrated by an Apollodorus figure who was absent from the party). But
Kierkegaard’s narrator starts raising questions about his own presence at the
party by noting that he “participated without being a participant.” This is part
of Kierkegaard’s effort to reconcile writing with an abdication of authority.
Kierkegaard will further pull the rug out from under his readers by having this
narrator himself become a “superfluous character,” who later concedes, unlike
the ægtemand Judge William, that he is not real.
The excessive repudiation of authority by the dialogue’s narrator—not
content with an Apollodorus figure who merely was not in attendance at
the banquet, Kierkegaard creates a character who is not even “real”—takes
on added importance because the Socratic is framed (most notably by Judge
William in the passage quoted above) as less about the purported wisdom of
the character itself and more about the diffuse context in which, or indirect
method by which, wisdom is unveiled. The dialogue form, coupled with the
ahistorical “someone said” that introduces the question and answer form,
is vital to the Socratic. But one of the peculiarities in this Kierkegaardian
reenactment of the Socratic symposium (and here it may not matter whether
we refer to Plato’s or Xenophon’s Socratic dinner-party dialogue), is the lack of a
Socrates character in the dialogue concerning love proper. By making so many
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 831

of the speakers Kierkegaardian inventions, there is no equivalent to Socrates.

Given the pseudonyms’ special relationship to Kierkegaard, that is, as nearly
self-sufficient authorial voices outside of “In Vino Veritas,” no one character
has an obviously central role as the wise person at the dinner party. The effect,
in short, is to show the absence of Socrates to be fundamentally Socratic.
And in place of the historical figures of Plato’s text, who root the Symposium
(however uneasily) in a referential world of historical-fictional reality, “In
Vino Veritas” takes as its main speakers pseudonyms from other Kierkegaard
texts, including Johannes the Seducer and Victor Eremita from Either/Or,
and Constantin Constantius from Repetition. Pseudonyms already lie in that
borderland between character and author, and away from the temporal,
factual specificity of Plato’s narrators, but Kierkegaard goes further in “In Vino
Veritas.” He creates the pseudonymous author/narrator William Afham. The
name Afham, meaning “by him,” is particularly important. First, the name is
excessive, potentially referring back to Kierkegaard and to Plato as authors
of written symposia as well as forward to Judge William, the narrator of the
next part of the book. Second, the stamp of authorship in af William Afham,
a mirror-like phrase in which a name collapses into itself by serving as the
primary antecedent for the pronoun it contains, is ultimately a revocation of
any specific authority.11 These two gestures, of excess (an overabundance of
voices) and of anonymity (a reliance on none), lead the reader into a cascad-
ing vortex of transmission where access to a reliable and authentic source
is lost.
“In Vino Veritas” begins to disorient readers with prefatory signals that
point in different directions. Its subtitle reads: “A Recollection Related by
William Afham” (En Erindring efterfortalt af William Afham [7]). The prefixes
in “related” (efter-for-talt, told after, recalling fortale, which means preface,
as in pre-discourse) play against the archaic word then used for “preface”
( for-erindring, literally pre-recollection) at the start of “In Vino Veritas,”
splintering the temporality of recollection through the lenses of narrative (9).
Thus Kierkegaard begins a text that will offer, among other things, a critique
of Platonic recollection—not just by engaging with the subject matter of
recollection but also by folding it into the formal structures of narrative
retelling. This emphasizes the strange double vision of recollection that is
seen in the past tense of conventional narrative, which gives us the past in the
present (this is what happened) as though it were foretold (now I will tell you

11  Westfall stresses Kierkegaard’s radical renunciation of an authorial stance. “Authorship,

as practiced by Kierkegaard, is always already revocation” (2007, 223).
832 Schur and yamato

what happened). It also creates a chronology that is even more complicated

than that seen in Plato’s Symposium as it takes place in relation to Apollodorus’
history.
As indicated here, recollection in Stages is presented as parallel to, and
perhaps inseparable from, the formation of narrative as a reformulation of
experience. A recollection, by nature, is a time-shifting proposition—a making
present something past and a subjective reading of a past happening. Afham’s
preface (the so-called pre-recollection) to “In Vino Veritas,” which follows a note
to the reader from Hilarius Bookbinder, is devoted to the topic of recollection
as it pertains to Afham’s recounting the story of a banquet. In the opening
lines of his pre-recollection, the narrator undermines the very possibility of
recollection by comparing his activity to the transmission of a secret:

What a splendid occupation to prepare a secret for oneself, how seductive

to enjoy it, and yet at times how precarious to have enjoyed it, how easy
for it to miscarry for one. In other words if someone believes that a secret
is transferable as a matter of course, that it can belong to the bearer, he
is mistaken …
SLW 9

Like a secret, Afham suggests, a recollection is not simply a possession that

can be easily passed along. So the story he plans to tell has never been under
his authority. As Afham proceeds to muse on the nature of this problem, he
stresses the difference between memory and recollection. For “the power
of recollection,” Afham tells us, “is the power to distance, to place at a
distance” (10). This distancing by way of recalling and reconsidering the past
is akin to reading as well as writing an account of it. What is the secret that
Afham prepares for himself? We might well call it a reading of Kierkegaard’s
authorship, reconsidered from a distance, by way of Plato’s Symposium. Afham
also ponders the “bottling of the recollection” like a fine wine, which points
out the narrator’s role in the fabrication of this symposium, this drinking party
whose veritas he is preparing for us. Such musings may also recall the moment
in Plato’s Symposium when Socrates finally arrives at Agathon’s party. Socrates
laughs off Agathon’s wish to gain some Socratic wisdom by sitting near him.
Socrates claims to have scarcely any real wisdom. And in any case, wisdom
could not be transferred like water being siphoned from a fuller cup into an
emptier one (175d–e). One of the ironies of Kierkegaard’s title “In Vino Veritas”
is the idea that he could have somehow taken Socrates’ pagan water and turned
it into wine.
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 833

6 The Narrator Takes Himself out of the Equation

As if that were not enough to shake our grasp on the story’s pedigree,
Kierkegaard takes an even more radical step with his nearly anonymous
narrator. Afham, his name notwithstanding, seems in his preface to have
about as much of a created personality as Apollodorus and as much fictionally
acceptable personhood as any other Kierkegaardian writer, occasionally
making a point of speaking in the first person. That is, he has enough narratorial
presence generally to maintain the narrative system. But toward the end of “In
Vino Veritas” he annuls himself:

But who, then, am I? Let no one ask about that. If it did not occur to
anyone to ask before, then I am saved, for now I am over the worst of
it … I am the pure being and thus almost less than nothing. I am the
pure being that is everywhere present but yet not noticeable, for I am
continually being annulled.
I am like the line with the arithmetic problem above and the answer
below—who cares about the line?
SLW 86

Afham—again, remember that the name is the ambiguous “by him”—breathes

a sigh of relief that up to this point in the text no one has questioned him
and, by extension, the narrative authority that holds the text together. Then he
diffuses himself—and, by extension, the text’s authority—into what he terms
the nothingness of pure being. He caps this off with a striking image: “I am
like the line with the arithmetic problem above and the answer below—who
cares about the line?” While recollection has been a shaky notion from the
start of the book, this gesture goes even further by apparently obliterating the
individual who is doing the recollecting.
Let us examine the image of the line a bit further. Afham says that he is
like the line in a math problem presented vertically: the line acts as an equal
sign in an equation, which shows that the things above the line—in relation to
each other (x + y)—are equivalent to the result below the line. Annulling the
line—which is also drawing attention to the line to which we were not paying
attention before—accomplishes something peculiar: without the line, we
cease to see or think of the progress of the operation: x + y making z. Instead,
we see the strange superimposition of equivalence. The terms x + y and z may
be mathematically equivalent, but their essential difference is highlighted by
the vanishing line: x + y may make z, but they are not z. Returning to the gist
834 Schur and yamato

of Afham’s self-annulment, how does this highlighted illusion of equivalence

fit into the apparent obliteration of the individual narrative voice? If we allow
that the arithmetic image mitigates the notion of annulment, then the line
persists. It is “almost less than nothing,” and so the narrator withdraws from
the reader, but the line remains as a faintly disquieting reminder of all that
can, as Afham says in the text’s first sentence, “miscarry” between a problem
and its answer. For Afham, the hiddenness of the secret and even of the self is
essential for recollection, much as silence and absence are needed to maintain
the Socratic balance of Kierkegaard’s authorship.

7 Kierkegaard’s Socratic Legacy

This chapter suggests that Kierkegaard’s repudiation of authority, his reluctance

to communicate a systematic body of thought in straightforward prose, can be
helpfully understood as a Socratic attitude. Kierkegaard gives us a deliberately
crafted authorship that telescopes its author’s identity through a kaleidoscope
of contradiction, fictional narrative, and unreliable testimony. In this way,
as a writer, he pursues a Socratic withdrawal from authority and follows an
ongoing path of questioning. Socrates is famous for pausing on the way to
the symposium portrayed by Plato, lost in that moment of contemplation
that Kierkegaard describes as a quintessential act of silence (CI 11). But in
the Symposium, that private moment takes place precisely on the way to
the public forum of conversation. It is almost as if Socrates’ contemplative
standstill hides him from the narrative that goes ahead with Aristodemus
to the hubbub at Agathon’s house. On the understanding that Socratic
silence stands apart from writing as it does from dialogue, the noisiness of
Kierkegaard’s texts has a parallel in the public existence of Socratic dialogue
and the general legacy of publication that has given form to the Socrates we
know today.
Søren Kierkegaard now belongs to a branch of European writing, often
known under the rubric of Continental philosophy, that puts particular
stress on the value of deliberately indirect communication. This impulse is
observable in writers such as Parmenides and Plato as well as Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, who are not simply difficult to read at times (like Kant or Hegel are,
for example), but who consciously eschew or skew the conventional trappings
of expository prose. Thus Nietzsche writes approvingly of a hidden type of man
“who instinctively needs speech for silence” (ein solcher Verborgener, der aus
Instinkt das Reden zum Schweigen … braucht), who is drawn to an “evasion of
Kierkegaard ’ s Socratic Way of Writing 835

communication” (Ausflucht vor Mittheilung).12 A comparable impulse is seen

in the ambivalence of modern literary authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert
Walser, and Fernando Pessoa toward the nature of authorship and publication.

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