ABSTRACT
Benjamin Daise, in his Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art, was arguably the first to investigate Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Socrates’ sense of vocation and method of communication in a full-length, philosophical monograph. Daise operates on a two-fold premise: Kierkegaard claimed that Christendom was in need of a (Socratic) “mid-wife,” and he knew how to be one. The significance of Daise’s monograph is that, by developing Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication as inspired by Socrates, it offers an innovative contribution to the debate over how to understand Kierkegaard’s dictum that “truth is subjectivity,” and challenges the charge that he was irrationalist. For George Pattison, Daise correctly observes that how an individual conceives of one’s relation to society affects both the propriety of and need for indirect communication.
