Philosophy as a way of life

What, for Hamann, was only a temporary expedient became a fundamental, existential attitude for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard's penchant for masks is most evident in his use of pseudonyms. As is well known, most of Kierkegaard's works were first published under a variety of pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Oimacus, etc. W c are not dealing here with an editorial caprice.

Rather, for Kierkegaard, all these pseudonyms correspond to different levels

- the "aesthetic," "ethical," and "religious" - at which the author was supposed to be situated. Kierkegaard speaks successively of Christianity as an aesthete, then as a moralist, in order to force his contemporaries into the awareness that they are not true Christians. "He hid himself beneath the mask of an artist and half-believing moralist to speak about what he believed most deeply." 24

Kierkegaard was perfectly aware of the Socratic character of his method: From the point of view of my whole activity as an author, integrally conceived, the aesthetic work is a deception, and herein is to be found the deeper significance of the use of pseudonyms. A deception, however, is a rather ugly thing. To this I would make answer: One must not let oneself be deceived by the word "deception." One can deceive a person for the truth's sake, and (to recall old Socrates) one can deceive a person into the truth. Indeed, it is only by this means, i.e. by deceiving him, that it is possible to bring into the truth one who is in an illusion.25

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