Apology: Kierkegaard’s socratic point of view

Not long before he died in 1855, Søren Kierkegaard composed a brief essay entitled “My Task.”1 In this relatively neglected work he argues that if we want to understand him and the philosophical activities he has been engaged in, then there is only one instructive object of comparison: Socrates and the role he played as philosophical gadfly in ancient Athens. In this article I critically discuss this text and consider in particular Kierkegaard’s claim that his refusal to call himself a Christian-in a context where it was the social norm to do so-is methodologically analogous to Socrates’ stance of ignorance.