always together and
Søren sat in on his father’s theology discussion group.
Then the father’s children began to die one after the other
and the father began to think he was cursed by God because
he had cursed God and committed adultery and he was
consumed in a guilt complex with which Søren identified.
At university Kierkegaard was caught up in boredom
and felt he was an ugly little critter who was unlovable.
But then when Regina really loved him he was astounded.
All of a sudden he realized that the reconciliation process
that Socrates describes in the Phaedrus was happening to him.
Socrates said that our body is like a chariot that is
pulled by a vulgar black horse and a noble white horse
and driven by the charioteer of our rational intellect.
When the black horse beholds a beautiful boy he wants sex.
He is so strong that the white horse and the charioteer are dragged
along into sexual activity and since exercise builds strength
the addiction increases and vulgar lust is all powerful.
But it can happen that the soul can fall in love with
the right beloved soul and then the white horse and
the charioteer will sublimate the energy of the black horse
in a reconciling, life changing enthusiasm of Divine Madness.
II.1.3 The Logic of Skeptical Irony
When Kierkegaard and Regina fell in love the indescribable joy
of his erotic inspiration took him totally beyond boredom
and awakened the genius of his creative illness with the energy
of that ancient Platonic love of the Symposium and the Phaedrus.
Kierkegaard now knew Socrates from within and with the energy
of the black horse he could now write his brilliant Master’s Thesis
on The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates.
Socrates was the master of irony because he became the wisest
man in Athens by knowing that he could know nothing.
He clearly saw that the Pre-Socratic philosophical physicists
only had theories when they claimed that all things came from
the one, or the two, or the few, or the many or the infinite.
He knew that they could never know the truth about the becoming
of all things and that allowed him to ironically move from
their proud, pretending, pompously ponderous prejudice
to a new humble, honest, hilariously humorous health.
Kierkegaard saw how true philosophical irony is more than
a literary trope which says one thing and means its opposite.
When the skeptic moves from knowing nothing to being wise
he is working with the logic of mixed opposites that became
for Kierkegaard the very logic of Christian agapeic reconciliation.
Søren saw that the aesthete’s inclusive opposites reconcile
in a common poverty that is always bored but never boring.
The ethical exclusivistic opposites do not reconcile in
a common mediocrity that is never bored but always boring.
Socrates went beyond either inclusive or exclusive opposites
to parallel opposites of the neither/nor of infinite resignation.
In his skeptical irony he was resigned to never knowing
but his wisdom was open to his Daimon for direction.
Socrates had discovered the religion of the second immediacy
but Søren saw that it was not the God man’s reconciliation.
II.1.4 The Logic of Agapeic Reconciliation
The Socratic reconciliation with which Søren was so gifted
when he fell in love with his beautiful and adorable Regina
did harmonize him in three dimensions of his personhood.
But it did not reconcile him to marrying with her.
He was reconciled within himself, with the world and with God.
But after his engagement with Regina he called it off
because he saw that if he married her he would lose
his erotic inspiration and all its religious creative energy.
His thorn in the flesh which troubled him even more than
being a hunchbacked, little cripple probably had to do
with homosexual inclinations and so he felt so
unbelievably blessed to be able to really love his Regina.
Socrates, like so many Greeks, saw Platonic love as
the homosexual love of a man for a beautiful youth.
When Socrates and Plato discovered Platonic love in which
erotic passion made possible celibacy and celibacy’s greater passion
they were astounded at the reconciliation of the black and
white horse with its love of wisdom and even of holiness.
Søren saw at once the difference between Platonic erotic love
and agapeic erotic love and he knew his was not agapeic.
He thought that if he had Christian faith he would be able
to marry her and still have his erotic inspiration.
Agapeic reconciliation in its logic moves from
