Kierkegaard's goal was to make the reader aware of his mistakes, not by directly refuting them, but by setting them forth in such a way that their absurdity would become clearly apparent. This is as Socratic as can be. At the same time, Kierkegaard used pseudonymy to give voice to all the different characters within him. In the process, he objectified his various selves, without recognizing himself in any of them, just ns Socrates, by means of hiN
skillful questions, objectified the self of hii; intc1·locutor11 wit hout recol(nizinl(
The Figure of Socrates
1 5 1
himself i n any of them. Thus we find Kierkegaard writing: "Because o f my melancholy, it was years before I was able to say 'thou' to �yself. Between my melancholy and my 'thou,' there was a whole world of fantasy. I exhausted it, in part, in my pseudonyms." 26 Yet Kierkegaard was not content to mask himself behind pseudonyms. His real mask was Socratic irony itself; it was Socrates himself: "0 Socrates! Yours and mine are the same adventure! I am alone. My only analogy is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task." 27
Kierkegaard termed this Socratic method his "method of indirect communication." 28 We encounter it once again in Nietzsche, for whom it is the method of the great educator: "An educator never says what he himself thinks, but always only what he thinks of a thing in relation to the requirements of those he educates. He must not be detected in this dissimulation." 29 This method is justified by the educator's transcendent mission:
"Every profound spirit needs a mask; better yet, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false - that is to say, superficial - interpretation of his every word, step, and manifestation of life." JO The mask of the Socratic Silenus served as the model for Nietzsche's theory of the mask. As he wrote in the unpublished writings of the last period of his life:
I believe that this was the magic of Socrates: he had one soul, and another one in behind it, and behind it still another one. It was in the first one that Xenophon lay down to sleep; in the second, Plato; and in the third one Plato again, but this time Plato with his own second soul.
Plato himself is a man with many a hidden cave behind and facades out front.31
As for Kierkegaard, so for Nietzsche: masks were a pedagogical necessity, but also a psychological need. Nietzsche himself could be included in his category of "men who want only to be seen shining through others. And there's a lot of wisdom in this." 32 In his Ecce Homo,-13 Nietzsche himself admits that he used his masters Schopenhauer and Wagner as masks in writing his Untimely Meditations, just as Plato had used Socrates as a
"semiotics." There is indeed a relationship comparable to that between Plato and Socrates here: Nietzsche was speaking of an ideal Wagner and an ideal Schopenhauer, who were really nothing other than Nietzsche himself. As Bertram34 has convincingly shown, one of Nietzsche's masks was certainly Socrates himself; Socrates, whom he pursued with the same amorous hatred that Nietzsche feels for Nietzsche; that same Socrates who, he tells us, "is so close to me, that I am almost always fighting with him." 35 The side of SocmteH Nietzsche hates is identical with the Nietzsche who dissolves myths, rcplndng the l(od11 by the knowledge of good and evil; the Nietzsche who brinl(ll men'11 mind11 back ro 1hinl(11 humnn, 1111 too human The side of
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Figures
Socrates which Nietzsche loves, and of which he is jealous, is what he himself would like to be: the seducer, the educator, and the guide of souls. We shall have occasion to return to this amorous hatred.
The Socratic mask is the mask of irony. If we examine the texts - by Plato,36
Aristotle,37 or Theophrastus38 - in which the word eironeia appears, we can conclude that irony is a psychological attitude in which the individual uses self-deprecation in an attempt to appear inferior to what he really is. In the art and usage of discourse, it takes the form of pretending to concede that one's interlocutor is right, and to adopt the point of view of one's adversary.
The rhetorical figure of eironeia, then, consists in using words or speeches which the audience would rather have expected to hear coming from the mouth of one's adversary.39 This is certainly the form assumed by Socratic irony. In the words of Cicero: "By disparaging himself, Socrates used to concede more than was necessary to the adversaries he wanted to refute.
Thus, thinking one thing and saying another, he enjoyed using the kind of dissimulation which the Greeks call 'irony'." 40 Socratic irony is thus a feigned self-deprecation, which consists primarily in passing oneself off as someone completely ordinary and superficial. As Alcibiades puts it in his praise of Socrates:
His speech is for all the world like those Sileni that open up down the middle. When you listen to it for the first time, you just can't help finding it absolutely ridiculous. He talks about pack asses and blacksmiths and shoemakers and tanners, and he always seems to be repeating the same thing, so that anyone who wasn't used to his style and wasn't very quick on the uptake would naturally take it for the most utter nonsense.41
Not only was Socrates guilty of banality in the subjects he discussed, but his interlocutors were banal, as well. He sought out and found his audience in the marketplace, the gymnasia, artists' workshops, and shops. He was a street person. In the words of Nietzsche: "Mediocrity is the most appropriate mask the superior spirit can wear." 42 Socrates talked and debated, but he refused to be considered a master. "When people came to sec him," remarks Epictetus, "and asked him to introduce them to other philosophers, he complied readily, and willingly accepted to pass unnoticed himself." 43
Here we touch the heart of Socratic irony: if Socrates refused to teach or be considered a master, it was because he had nothing to say or to communicate, for the excellent reason that, as he frequently proclaimed, he did not know anything. Since he had nothing to say, and no thesis to defend, all Socrates could do was to ask questions, even thoul(h he himself refused to answer them. In the first book of the Repu/Jlir, ThrR11ymRcllllt1 cries out: "Y c gods! Herc we have the well-known rirm1ri11 of Sorn11l•111 "till I k nrw ii und
The Figure of Socrates
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predicted that when it came to replying you would refuse and dissemble and do anything rather than answer any question that anyo\le asked you." 44
Aristotle described the situation even more clearly: "Socrates used to ask questions and not answer them - for he used to confess that he did not know." 45
Obviously, we cannot know exactly how Socrates' discussions with the Athenians took place. Plato's dialogues - even the most "Socratic" - are only a doubly weak imitation of them. In the first place, they are not spoken, but written, and, as Hegel remarked, "in printed dialogue, answers are altogether under the author's control; but to say that in actual life people are found to answer as they arc here made to do, is quite another thing." 46 Moreover, beneath the surface charm of literary fiction, we can recognize in Plato's dialogues the trace of the scholastic exercises of the Platonic Academy.