Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/18

 Though not by Kierkegaard himself counted among the works bearing on the "Indirect Communication" — presently to be explained — his magisterial dissertation, entitled "The Conception of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates," a book of 300 pages, is of crucial importance. It shows that, helped by the sage who would not  help any one, he had found the master key: his own interpretation of life. Indeed, all the following literary output may be regarded as the consistent development of the simple directing thoughts of his firstling work. And we must devote what may seem a disproportionate amount of space to the explanation of these thoughts if we would enter into the world of his mind.

Not only did Kierkegaard feel kinship with Socrates. It did not escape him that there was an ominous similarity between Socrates' times and his own — between the period of flourishing Attica, eminent in the arts and in philosophy, when a little familiarity with the shallow phrases of the Sophists enabled one to have an opinion about everything on earth and in heaven, and his own Copenhagen in the thirties of the last century, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg had popularized Hegelian philosophy with such astonishing success that the very cobblers were using the Hegelian terminology, with "Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis," and one could get instructions from one's barber, while being shaved, how to "harmonize the ideal with reality, and our wishes with what we have attained." Every difficulty could be "mediated," according to this recipe. And just as the great questioner of Athens gave pause to his more naïve contemporaries by his "know thyself," so Kierkegaard insisted that he must rouse his contemporaries from their philosophic complacency and unwarranted optimism, and move them to realize that the spiritual life has both mountain and valley, that it is no flat plain easy to travel. He intended to show difficulties where the road had been supposedly smoothed for them.

Central, both in the theory and in the practice of Socrates (according to Kierkegaard), is his irony. The ancient sage would stop old and young and quizz them skilfully on