Kierkegaard's Concept Of Irony

No other thinker had such a great influence upon Kierkegaard as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, not even Hegel, the German idealist who seems to have heavily influenced the Danish intellectual circles of the time as well as Kierkegaard himself. Kierkegaard envisaged his own task as a Socratic one; he took upon himself being the gadfly of Denmark, just as Socrates was the gadfly of Athens.

It has been pointed out by George Pattison that Kierkegaard sought orientation in Socrates, and this can be traced in almost all of his major works, from his first one, i.e. the magister dissertation that was entitled The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, to the last of them. A few weeks before his death, Kierkegaard expressed this deep affiliation between him and the Greek …show more content…
However, Kierkegaard observes, in The Concept of Irony, that Socrates’ method is based on the presupposition of a confession of ignorance on the part of Socrates. In, the Apology, he responds to the claim that he is the wisest man amongst the Athenians by stating that if that is so, it is not because he knows much more than his fellow citizens, but rather because, unlike other men in his city state who suppose that they are wise when they are not, he is not ignorant of his ignorance and does know the limits of his knowledge, if he has any at all. Moreover, not only does Socrates express his ignorance about the matters in question, but he also enjoins his interlocutors, through questioning, to admit their own ignorance about such matters, leading the entire situation to amount to nothing but the so-called aporia. Once aporia is attained, Socrates develops his dialogue no further, leaving his interlocutor in a state of complete negativity, which is something that the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel criticises while Kierkegaard himself