Summary: Philosophical Fragments (page 2)

If the teacher claims to teach truths, to bring them forth by himself in the pupil's mind, he lies—and thereby forfeits his status: If [the teacher] wants to give himself with his knowledge in some other way, then he gives nothing; he strips you of something; he is not even your friend, still less your teacher.¹ The teacher can only be a midwife: Among human beings, maieutics is all that is possible; the begetting remains the affair of the divinity.

This modesty does Socrates credit: it is the profound spirit of Socratic thought, that noble, that perfect humanity which was his. A humility that stands in sharp contrast to our own age, when half the people claim to be an authority.

We now reach the essential point: the conception of time on which this doctrine rests. A person knows truth from eternity. Hence the moment when he discovers it (that is, recollects it) is itself inessential:

The temporal point of departure is a nothing; for the very instant I discover that I have known the truth from eternity—though without knowing it—at that same instant the moment is buried in the eternal, absorbed into it, so that I could not even find it if I looked for it, because it has no location.

Thus we may say that for Socrates, a point of departure in time is therefore merely an accident, something without consequence, an occasion.

To sum up: we have here a first model—Socrates—whose figure embodies an original conception of truth, education, the relation between teacher and pupil, and time. It is a Greek, ancient conception, one that has shaped our thinking across the centuries.

Kierkegaard will now consider a second model: Christ. As we shall see, this figure overturns the Greek conception by offering a radically different account of truth, the teacher, and time.

What, then, is the Christian conception of teaching the truth? That is what we shall now examine.

Jesus, too, is a teacher: he comes to teach the truth.

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

He is surrounded by disciples—the twelve apostles—who are themselves charged with delivering his word and spreading the Good News: the Son of God died and rose again. This is a truth everyone is called to receive, converting through that second birth which is faith.

But the figure of Christ rests on an entirely different conception of what truth is, and of how it is transmitted—and therefore of what a teacher is, and his pupil.

Here, it is the teacher (Jesus) who brings the truth, who reveals it to the one who did not know it: it is a gift from God.

Or rather, a double gift: God gives us the truth, but also the key to understanding it—what Kierkegaard calls the 'condition':

If, then, the disciple is to receive the truth, the teacher must bring it to him; and more than that, he must also give him the condition for understanding it; for if the disciple himself possessed that condition, he would only need to recollect.

The condition is therefore what makes us capable of understanding the truth.

Now, the one who gives the disciple not only the truth but also the condition is not a teacher, but a God.

If God reveals the truth to us, it follows—contrary to the Socratic conception—that the human being is naturally in error, carrying within himself no innate wisdom that he could recover through remembrance. He must be defined as outside the truth […] or as untruth.

Truth is no longer in us, the disciples, from the outset.

On the basis of this simple analysis, Kierkegaard then recovers—rediscovers—the principal founding concepts of Christianity:
- sin: But this state of being untruth—and of being so through one's own fault—what shall we call it? Let us call it sin.
- the saviour: What, then, shall we call such a teacher, who restores the condition and with it the truth? Let us call him a saviour, for he saves his disciple from unfreedom.
- the redeemer: Through unfreedom, the disciple has made himself guilty of something; therefore the teacher is a redeemer who removes the wrath that rests upon the fault.
- conversion: When the disciple is untruth […] and now receives the condition and the truth, he […] becomes a new man: let us call this change conversion, […] rebirth.
- repentance, corresponding to the sorrow […] of having remained so long in the previous state.

As we have seen, in the Socratic model the teacher is a mere occasion, of secondary importance; by contrast, here, such a teacher the disciple will never be able to forget; for in the same moment he would fall back into himself as someone [who is unfree]. Thus, our disciple will never be able to make that teacher forgotten, nor to make him disappear as in Socratic teaching.

The disciple owes everything to his teacher: the passage from non-being to being. Whereas with Socrates, the disciple is for the teacher the occasion for understanding himself, and reciprocally, the teacher is for the disciple the occasion for understanding himself; the teacher leaves behind no claim upon the soul of the disciple, any more than the disciple can pretend that the teacher owes him something.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading