Though not by Kierkegaard himself counted among the
works bearing on the "Indirect Communication" —presently
to be explained— his magisterial dissertation, entitled "The
Conception of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates,"
a book of 300 pages, is of crucial importance. It shows
that, helped by the sage who would not directly help
any one, he had found the master key: his own interpreta-
tion of life. Indeed, all the following literary output may
be regarded as the consistent development of the simple
directing thoughts of his firstling work. And we must de-
vote what may seem a disproportionate amount of space
to the explanation of these thoughts if we would enter into
the world of his mind.
Not only did Kierkegaard feel kinship with Socrates. It
did not escape him that there was an ominous similarity
between Socrates' times and his own — between the period
of flourishing Attica, eminent in the arts and in philosophy,
when a little familiarity with the shallow phrases of the
Sophists enabled one to have an opinion about everything
on earth and in heaven, and his own Copenhagen in the
thirties of the last century, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg
had popularized Hegelian philosophy with such astonishing
success that the very cobblers were using the Hegelian ter-
minology, with "Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis," and
one could get instructions from one's barber, while being
shaved, how to "harmonize the ideal with reality, and our
wishes with what we have attained." Every difficulty could
be "mediated," according to this recipe. And just as the
great questioner of Athens gave pause to his more naive
contemporaries by his "know thyself," so Kierkegaard in-
sisted that he must rouse his contemporaries from their
philosophic complacency and unwarranted optimism, and
move them to realize that the spiritual life has both moun-
tain and valley, that it is no flat plain easy to travel. He
intended to show difficulties where the road had been sup-
posedly smoothed for them.
Central, both in the theory and in the practice of Socrates (according to Kierkegaard), is his irony. The ancient sage would stop old and young and quizz them skilfully on