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Kierkegaard on Socrates' Daimonion Kierkegaard on Socrates’ daimonion Citation for published version (APA): Sneller, R. (2020). Kierkegaard on Socrates’ daimonion. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 81(1), 87-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2019.1649602 DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2019.1649602 Document status and date: Published: 01/01/2020 Document Version: Publisher’s PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers) Please check the document version of this publication: • A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. 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If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement: www.tue.nl/taverne Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at: [email protected] providing details and we will investigate your claim. Download date: 05. Oct. 2021 International Journal of Philosophy and Theology ISSN: 2169-2327 (Print) 2169-2335 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpt20 Kierkegaard on Socrates’ daimonion Rico Sneller To cite this article: Rico Sneller (2020) Kierkegaard on Socrates’ daimonion, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 81:1, 87-100, DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2019.1649602 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2019.1649602 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 15 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 505 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjpt20 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 2020, VOL. 81, NO. 1, 87–100 https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2019.1649602 ARTICLE Kierkegaard on Socrates’ daimonion Rico Sneller Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Technical University Eindhoven ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY In this article, I argue that Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates’ Received 21 January 2019 daimonion in The Concept of Irony should be read in light of his Accepted 25 July 2019 The Concept of Anxiety notion of the demonic in ,andviceversa. KEYWORDS fi fi Whereas the rst should primarily be seen as an exempli cation of Socrates’ daimonion; philosophical transcendental consciousness, the second assumes demonic; irony; anxiety amorestrictly‘moral’ connotation (‘anxiety about the good’). If the notion of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety draws upon the Socratic daimonion in The Concept of Irony,thiswillhaveimplications for philosophy and science in so far as they take a transcendental consciousness for granted. However, Kierkegaard’s continued refer- ence to, if not identification with, Socrates, prevents us from immo- bilising Kierkegaard’s ‘own’ philosophy, as though the Socratic position can ever be definitively overcome. The ‘enclosed reserve’ of the demonic is rather philosophy’sweakspot. Introduction In his famous dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841), Kierkegaard offers a highly original, promising interpretation of Socrates. This interpretation turns out to lay the basis not only for his subsequent philosophy but even for what would later be called ‘existentialism’. Kierkegaard develops his Socrates interpretation with continual, yet critical reference to Hegel’s thinking. To both Kierkegaard and Hegel, the figure of ‘Socrates’ represents a decisive position that demarcates a philosophical point of no return. Hegel highlights Socrates’ stance as a transition from self-consciousness to reason (Vernunft). Kierkegaard, while not rejecting this Hegelian view, emphasises that already Hegel himself had pointed out Socrates’ stagnation. For, so Hegel had claimed, Socrates does not put forward a political philosophy and continues to falter at the level of sole individuality, thereby impeding the self-unfolding of the Spirit. What Hegel ultimately takes to be a limitation, though, becomes essential to Kierkegaard. Socrates’ lingering in a position of subjectivity – finally overcome in the history of philosophy, according to Hegel – is decisive for Kierkegaard. Being-an-individual does not exemplify an irreversible passage to civil society; it is philosophy’s nec plus ultra.1 Since Antiquity there has been much speculation about Socrates’ daimonion, the mysterious warning voice preventing Socrates from what he was on the verge of doing; from Plutarchus and Apollodorus onward, until Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Carl du Prel,2 philosophers have tried to make sense of this remarkable phenomenon. I have not even CONTACT Rico Sneller [email protected] © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 88 R. SNELLER mentioned contemporary scholarly research on the Socratic daimonion, which likewise greatly differs in its interpretations.3 While the relation between Kierkegaard and Socrates is prominent in the literature,4 no research has been done on Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates’ daimonion. I believe the daimonion is crucial for understanding what Kierkegaard calls ‘subjectivity’. Whereas Hegel had denied the daimonion any philosophi- cal relevance (for being purely private),5 to Kierkegaard it becomes something essential, something decisive for the Socratic philosophical position as such. The daimonion, in Kierkegaard, represents the major impediment for making a leap.Itkeepsthesubject enclosed within itself. In this article, I want to argue that for Kierkegaard the daimonion exemplifies transcendental consciousness. The latter, while being Idealistic philosophy’s vantage point, in the eyes of Kierkegaard entails the disease of a de-historicised and de- realised human subjectivity. It will not be my aim in this article to justify Kierkegaard’s critique of transcendental consciousness; the notion itself rather enables identifying vulnerable spots in the philosophies of, e.g. Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and perhaps even Schelling and Hegel. Introduced by Kant, the term ‘transcendental’ refers to a supposedly pure, i.e. non-empirical, condition of possibility of contents of consciousness, whether perceptive or reflective. Hegel at least attempted to reconnect transcendental conscious- ness to empirical reality, yet in a way that left part of it unaffected. Kierkegaard’s philosophical posterity (Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel) explicitly endorsed the critique of transcendental consciousness, thereby implicitly drawing on the early Kierkegaardian analyses of the Socratic daimonion. Although ‘transcendental consciousness’ is not a term that infallibly always belongs to this or that philosophy, it can be safely assumed that what it stands for represents a relentless urge of Modern philosophy at large, both in its idealist-rationalist and in its empiricist-positivist versions: the urge to free itself from concrete self-experience. More clearly than Kierkegaard himself was able to do, post- Kierkegaardian vitalist or existentialist philosophers, especially Dilthey and Marcel, have explicitly addressed and criticised this urge as unrealistic and falsifying. Marcel, for example, complained that ‘the transcendental Ego was a monster, or at least a fiction’.6 Charles Taylor’s analysis of Modernity (in his magnum opus Sources of the Self)aslargely based on ‘disengaged selfhood’ greatly draws on Kierkegaard. In support of my claim that Socrates’ daimonion represents transcendental conscious- ness, I will resort to reading Kierkegaard’s interpretation in light of the category of the ‘demonic’ in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). In this book, the demonic largely functions in the same way as Socrates’ daimonion in The Concept of Irony: it keeps the subject enclosed in itself. Kierkegaard defines it as det Indesludede, translated by Reidar Thomte as ‘enclosing reserve’.7 Separated by only three years, the two concept-books (Begrebet Angest,BegrebetIroni) taken as my reference points here turn around the same central
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