Soren Kierkegaard

that the subjective element is too prominent.” Although they were not half-
educated, nor (apart from Martensen) particularly Hegelian, in their written
evaluations every one of the readers complained precisely about Kierke-
gaard’s stylistic “uninhibitedness,” his lack of restraint. They had various
difficulties in accepting the proposition that not only could scholarship be
humorous, but that the humor could itself be a part of scholarliness. It was
thus fortunate that Kierkegaard had deleted from the dissertation’s preface
a passage in which he intimated to the reader that “at times, in order to
lighten my burden, I sing at my work.” Seen from his own, retrospective
viewpoint, on the other hand, it was a shame that he had been injudicious
enough to have insisted at one point that it had been “a shortcoming in
Socrates that he had had no eye for the totality and had only looked, numer-
ically, to the individuals.” In a journal entry from the autumn of 1850 Kier-
kegaard commented on this issue with a bitter outburst: “Oh, what a Hegel-
ian fool I was. It was precisely this that constituted the major proof of how
great an ethicist Socrates was.”
The first portion of the dissertation is relatively well-behaved and has the
form of a detailed analysis of the interpretations of Socrates’ character—and
not least, the character of Socrates’ irony—advanced by Xenophon, Plato,
and Aristophanes. Kierkegaard developed a two-pronged analysis. On the
one hand, he attempted to define Socrates’ world-historical significance, his
significance for the story of history. On the other hand, he searched out
Socrates’ significance for the history of subjectivity. Kierkegaard went to
great lengths to fulfill the demands posed by an academic dissertation with
respect to method, scholarly exactitude, familiarity with sources, and other
formal requirements, but he did not take any pleasure in playing the blood-
less scholar: “I have now finished presenting my conception of Socrates as
he is exhibited in Xenophon’s peepshow, and in conclusion I will ask only
that the readers, if they have been bored, not place the blame on me alone.”
The second part of the dissertation, which treats romantic irony, consti-
tutes a remarkable about-face from an academic treatment of the material
to the sort of exposition which at times borders on the reckless. Of course,
the wish to write on irony—in particular, on the concept of irony—is in
itself ironic. Irony never permits itself to be subsumed under its concept in
orderly fashion. It does not want to be conceptualized; on the contrary, its
character is to expand beyond all boundaries. Even in the introduction to
his dissertation, Kierkegaard explains that it is as difficult to sketch irony, as
expressed in Socrates, as it is to “depict an imp wearing the cap that makes
him invisible.” The image is almost a violent assault on the power of imagi-
nation: We wish to see something that has the power to prevent us from
seeing anything at all. Later in the dissertation, irony’s negative power to