[MUSIC]One of the charges that was raised againstSocrates wasthat he worshipped foreign gods that werenot worshipped in Athens.This charge refers to what Socrates calledhis daimon.This is a Greek word that means literallya god or a spirit.In many of the Platonic dialogues, mentionis made of Socrates' daimonas a kind of personal spirit or innervoice that advises him.Modern scholars have had difficultiesmaking sense of this.Some try to interpret it as thevoice of conscience while others regard itas a form of superstition.Something like a guardian angel.In his trial Socrates explains the daimonas follows."�something divine and spiritual comes tome�.This has been coming to me as akind of voice, beginning in childhood, andwheneverit comes, it always diverts me from whatI am about to do, but never urges me on."So Socrates claims that he has a private,inner voicethat prevents him from getting intotrouble bytelling him not to do something that isill-considered.But the daimon never offers him anypositive suggestions for what he shoulddo.The daimon is purely negative. Socratesbelieves thatthis also is a part of his divine missionand to be a part of the divine will.When the jurors convict him of the chargesand sentence him to death he claimsthat he's not concerned about this sincethroughoutthe entire trial his daimon never onceraisedan objection to anything that he wassaying or doing.A fact that Socrates takes to mean thateverything is proceeding according tothe divine will. Therefore, he concludesthat he has nothing to fear.This was also an idea that Kierkegaardidentified with.In his work, The Point of Viewfor My Work as an Author, in whichhe reflects on his life and his writing

career,he explains his conviction that his lifehas been driven by an invisible, divinegovernance.God had a plan for his life whichKierkegaard unwittingly realized.God was, in a sense, guiding Kierkegaardin his writings in the same way thatSocrates' daimon was guiding him.Another feature of Socrates' thought iswhat isreferred to as maieutics or the art ofmidwifery.The word maieutics simply comes from theGreek adjective maieutikos meaning of orabout midwifery.Socrates explains that his mother was amidwifeand that he took this art from her.When he questions people, the goal heclaims isto get them to come to the truth forthemselves.The ideais that they implicitly have the truthwithin themselves but without knowing thisconsciously.But this knowledge can be brought to lightwiththe kind of leading questioning thatSocrates engages in.A famous example of this is when Socratesquestions an uneducated slave boy indialogue the Meno,and merely by questioning without statinganything positive himself, he is able tolead the boy to an understanding of someof the basic principles of geometry.Everyone present is astonished that theboy apparently knew geometry ahead oftimewithout ever having any instruction in it.This is consistent with Socrates'repeatedclaim that he doesn't teach anything.He claims merely to be a midwife whoassistsin the birth of ideas but himself doesn'tproduce them.He simply helps others to produce them andto evaluate them subsequently.The ideas lie hidden in the individualsthemselves, without them even being awareof them.This later leads Socrates to a doctrine ofinnate ideas, that isthe notion that we're born with certainideas right from the startand that we know things before actuallyhaving any experience of the world.

Socrates' maieutics is a motif that Kierkegaardalso uses in his writings.He doesn't want to state explicitly whathe thinks Christianityis, but by means of his writings he wantsto helpothers to arrive at their own conceptionof it.It's my pleasure to have with me todayProfessor Peter Sajdafrom the Slovak Academy of Sciencein Bratislava.Professor Sajda is a leading internationalKierkegaard scholar and he's donesubstantialwork in the fields of Kierkegaard and mysticism and the 20th century receptionof Kierkegaard's thought.Professor Sajda, why does Kierkegaard makeuseof Socrates, a pagan philosopher, for anunderstandingof what he takes to be the problemsof Christianity or Christendom in his ownday?Kierkegaard says sometimes that hisphilosophy revolves around a simplequestion, andthe question is what does it mean to be aChristian?And as we know,Kierkegaard posed this question tohimself,because it concerned his own life, hisown existence, but he also posed thisquestion to his contemporaries, to theagehe was living in.And as far as he could see from mostpeople this was an easy question with aneasy answer.It was supposed that one is basically bornaChristian, that one grows up in a Christianfamily,one's friends are Christians,one lives in a Christian state, as somewould consider Denmark to be.So it was enough just to go with thecrowd and therewas no doubt about one's Christianidentity. The identity was secure.There was no reason to question it, todebate it.So, Kierkegaard's question was ina way a provocation because he wanted tostir upa controversy about something that wasconsidered completely uncontroversial.So how specifically do you see this as

relevant for Socrates?I think that Kierkegaard saw inSocrates athinker whose philosophy also revolvedaround a simple question.And again it was a question that wasseenas a provocation and it turned intoa problem something that was consideredcompletely unproblematic.Socrates' question was what does itmean to be a human being?And Kierkegaard knows that inSocrates'time people were perfectly sure of beinghumanand of knowing what does it mean tobe a human being.But strangely enough,Socrates doubted that one is human simplyby birth.Instead, he argued thatwe need to learn to be human,we need to learn what it means to behumans.And he considered this to be no easytask.He argued that every individual isfaced witha task with this question and has toanswer itwith his or her own existence.So the question was addressed to the individual.The collective could not answer forthe individual.The individual could not inherit theanswerfrom the collective or delegate it to thecollective.And I think that in this Socrates wasa source of inspiration for Kierkegaardbecause also thethe question, what does it mean to bea Christian is addressed to thesingle individual.And the individual cannot inherit theanswerfrom the collective or delegate it to thecollective.He must answer it with his or her ownexistence.So the answer can only come in theform of an existential transformation ofthe single individual.So what special and unique message doyou think Kierkegaardas a Christian writer has for us today ina pluralistic society?I wouldlike to highlight two aspects of

Kierkegaard as a Christian writer.I think these two aspects are in acreative tension.The first aspect is that Kierkegaardis really a thinker who goesad fontes,he goes to the sources, to the sources ofChristianityin this case and that means first andforemost exploring the Bible.And so when we read Kierkegaard wesee thathe's a thinker who is an avid readerof the Bible.He's a very attentive reader.He has great imagination and hereads the Bible in a verycreative way.So he plunges into the psychology ofthe Biblical figures and explores theirinner struggles.He invents alternatives to biblicalstories andlets the reader compare them to theoriginal.He plays for a long time with onesentence and analyzing each of its wordsand their potential meanings.So, as readers we're oftensurprised how much we discoverthrough Kierkegaard's interpretationsof the Bible.And the second aspect which I wouldlike to highlight isthat Kierkegaard always brings the Bibleinto productive dialogue withnon-christian sources.So what example can you give for howKierkegaardbrings the Bible into a dialoguewith other sources.I think there are many examples ofthis in his works,both the published works and inhis journals and papers.But, I would like to mention oneexample, which is the pseudonymous work, Fearand Trembling.As we know, in Fear and TremblingKierkegaardplays or elaborates on the Biblical motifof Abraham'ssacrifice of Isaac, which is a story takenfromthe book of Genesis, the first book of theBible.But interestingly enough he doesnot, hedoes not explore this story with the helpof

Christian sources and Christianauthors.In fact, he draws on a relativelybroad variety of non-christian sources.He, borrows motifs from the Greekpoet Homer, from the Greek playwrightsSophocles and Euripides.He refers to the ancienthistorians Livy and Plutarch and refers tothe ideas of Greekphilosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates,Plato and Aristotle.So I think that what we can learnfrom Kierkegaardtoday is exactly thisimportance of solid knowledge ofone's own tradition and its principalsources, and the bringing ofthis tradition into productivephilosophical dialogue withsources from other traditions.One of the few friends thatKierkegaard had throughout his lifewas a man named Emil Boesen.He recalled the importance ofKierkegaard's mastersthesis for the philosopher's laterdevelopment, explaining, quote,"It was... most probably whileKierkegaard waswriting The Concept of Irony... that hefirstgained a clear understanding of what hehimselfwanted to do and what his abilities were."Boesen seems to suggest that therewas somethingabout Kierkegaard's work in this contextthat helped him to decide to be an author,and helped him to find out specificallywhat kind of an author he wanted to be.What was this?Much evidence supports the claim thatitwas Socrates who was the key forKierkegaard.Indeed, all the points that we'vetouched onhere were important for him in one way oranother.Aporia, the sophists, the gadfly,the daimon, maieutics and, of course,Socrates' irony.In many of the most important worksofthe authorship Kierkegaard returns to thefigure of Socrates.Socrates is discussed at some lengthin the PhilosophicalFragments as a form of learning that's

contrasted to Christianity.Likewise, reference is made toSocratesin the satirical work Prefaces from 1844.A large sectionof Kierkegaard's famous book, Stages onLife's Way, entitledIn vino veritasis modeled on Plato's dialogue, TheSymposium.Throughout Kierkegaard's edifyingdiscourses Socrates is referredto indirectly as the simple wise man ofold.Socrates also appears in scatteredpassages of the Concluding UnscientificPostscript.Moreover, he is discussed inconnection with thetheory of love in Kierkegaard's book,Works of Love.Kierkegaard also has one of hispseudonymous authorsinvoke Socrates explicitly in theSickness untoDeath as an alternative to the modernage.Finally, Socrates is mentioned as akind of model forKierkegaard in the final issue ofThe Moment, shortly before Kierkegaard'sdeath.Kierkegaard recognized some problemsinhis own day in nineteenth century Denmarkthat were analogous to the problems thatconfronted the Greeks in the fifth century BC.Moreover, human nature being what itis, he recognized many of his owncontemporaries inthe figures that are portrayed in thedialogues of Plato.Kierkegaard hit upon the idea thatwhat wasneeded in his own time was a new Socrates.By this, he meant, not someone whowouldcome up with a new philosophy or a newdoctrinebut rather someone who would disturband provoke people.Someone who would shake them fromtheir complacency.This was the goal that he decidedto set for himself.He would become the new Socrates, theSocrates of Copenhagen.