If the term “dialectic” maintains always its initial meaning of communing, the best way to place Socrates’ role in the thought of Kierkegaard is to regard the frame of dialectic as dialectic-dialogue. Socrates, using the dialectic art, managed to reverse the foundations of a question, to shift from one meaning to another, to highlight ambiguities where meanings appeared originally to be clear and obvious. In other words, the kind of dialogue that leads to aporia. Under the various categories of thought of Socrates, as these appeared through his oral speech and through the moral values that sealed his life, the main attribute of a philosopher should be sought in the conscious innocence of the questions he poses. Socrates admits that he does not know. The Socratic queries, using the mask of irony, left their traces in the mind of Kierkegaard and they had a deep effect insofar to him as aporia is presented as the paramount expression of knowledge• a knowledge that wants to become non-knowledge• a knowledge that becomes …show more content…
When Socrates, using irony, declares his ignorance and poses his question, he does not wait for an answer. Having, however, confused his interlocutor, he distances himself, he touches upon abstraction and is found in front of a void. This void, created by irony, is precisely what brings us in front of nothing, because it is an absolute negativity. So, Kierkegaard will insist particularly in the fact that Hegel, that supports the exact opposite, misinterpreted the concept of irony. All the ideas that were approached by the Socratic Method; virtue, love, the Socratic Daimon, death, are reduced to their negatives, in other words they are negative definitions What Socrates seeks above all, when he pretends to be ignorant, is to shake, to upset his interlocutor; to make him abandon his complacency, where, his mind has fallen asleep, even if he himself believes that he is well