It is often claimed that relativism, subjectivism and nihilism are typically modern philosophical problems that emerge with the breakdown of traditional values, customs and ways of life. The result is the absence of meaning, the lapse of religious faith, and feeling of alienation that is so widespread in modernity. The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) gave one of the most penetrating analyses of this complex phenomenon of modernity. But somewhat surprisingly he seeks insight into it not in any modern thinker but rather in an ancient one, the Greek philosopher Socrates. In this course created by former associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Jon Stewart, we will explore how Kierkegaard deals with the problems associated with relativism, the lack of meaning and the undermining of religious faith that are typical of modern life. His penetrating analyses are still highly relevant today and have been seen as insightful for the leading figures of Existentialism, Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism.
Lecture 5.2 Kierkegaard, Møller and Schlegel
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Del curso dictado por University of Copenhagen
Søren Kierkegaard - Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity
430 calificaciones
University of Copenhagen
430 calificaciones
De la lección
Kierkegaard, Møller and Schlegel
During this unit, we will continue the analysis of the second part of The Concept of Irony. Here Kierkegaard introduces the irony of the German Romantics as a contrastive form of irony to that of Socrates. We begin with Kierkegaard’s account of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity which, he (following Hegel) claims is the forerunner to Romantic irony. This then leads to Kierkegaard’s account of the appropriation of Fichte’s theory by the Romantic authors, Friedrich von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. This lecture also introduces one of Kierkegaard’s great mentors, Poul Martin Møller, who was also interested in an analysis of Romantic irony as a form of modern nihilism. We see how Kierkegaard is critical of Romantic irony as “historically unjustified,” while he continues his praise of Socratic irony. Finally, we continue the biographical narrative of Kierkegaard’s life with an account of his relation to and broken engagement with Regine Olsen.
Conoce a los instructores
Jon Stewart, PhD, Dr theol & philFormer Associate Professor
Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
Again, following Schlegel, Tieck points out that Fichte's theory of
the self-positing ego form the foundation of the theory of
irony and later thinkers such as Friedrich Von Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck.
But according to Kierkegaard these thinkers distorted
Fichte's theory by trying to apply it in a different context.
Kierkegaard makes two related objections.
He writes, "In the first place,
the empirical and finite I was confused with the eternal I;
in the second place, metaphysical actuality was confused with historical actuality."
Since Fichte was a philosopher,
his primary goal was to create a theory of
knowledge that corrected the shortcomings of Kahn's philosophy.
Thus, when he spoke about the self-positing ego or the I,
this was something theoretical,
but he wasn't talking about himself or any other particular person.
By contrast, Schlegel and Tieck were writers on art
and aesthetics and their agenda was quite different.
They took this theoretical entity from Fichte and
conceived of it as an actual living and breathing person.
In other words, they tried to employ
this abstract ego as a model for concrete behavior in the real world.
Specifically, Schlegel and Tieck saw in Fichte's theory
a powerful tool with which to criticize
the world of bourgeois customs, values, and beliefs.
Fichte's ego didn't recognize the validity of anything outside itself.
In these later Romantic thinkers,
seized upon this as a way to undermine what they regarded as
the old-fashioned and reactionary views in the society of their day.
But again, Kierkegaard points out that this differs from Socratic irony
which as we've seen was world-historically justified.
By contrast, he says that the Romantics use of
irony was not in the service of world spirit.
Socrates examined and undermined
specific beliefs that historically were no longer viable,
but the Romantics use irony to criticize everything.
Their criticism was indiscriminate.
Their goal was to tear down society while, at the same time,
glorifying the individual who was able to create himself.
It's true that in any society there are always things that are worthy of criticism,
corruption, nepotism, hypocrisy, and so forth.
But from this, it doesn't follow that all of
society is corrupt, nepotistic or hypocritical.
Every society has elements which represent problems,
but it doesn't follow from this that the entire society is worthy of criticism.
Thus, the Romantics make the error of universalizing their criticism to everything.
Due to this, they end up criticizing things which are quite reasonable that sound,
but all distinctions get washed away in the Romantics totalizing criticism.
This kind of indiscriminate criticism was never something that Socrates engaged in.
On the contrary, at his trial,
he emphasizes that it's important to follow the laws and
traditions of Athens such as consulting the oracle.
The Romantics don't criticize
specific antiquated values and
institutions in order to replace them with better and new ones.
But rather, they do so in order to celebrate and glorify the subjective ego itself.
Here Kierkegaard grants the correctness of Hegel's criticism of the Romantics.
He writes, "We also perceive here that this irony
was totally unjustified and that
Hegel's hostile behavior toward it is entirely an order."
One characteristic of the Romantic ironist is that he can
so to speak invent himself anew at any given moment.
There's nothing about his life for past that substantial or
binding and you can freely change whatever he wishes whenever he wishes.
When we tell the story of our lives,
we naturally attempt to put things in a positive light or to give
things a particular spin in accordance with our interests in the present.
Thus, certain things about our past that were insignificant at
the time take on great importance when viewed
in connection with some fact of the present.
Likewise, other events of the past which were quite
important at the time passed by unnoticed and are
forgotten if they seem to have
no connection to what's regarded as relevant in one's life in the present.
In this sense, our past is not a static fact of the matter,
but rather is to a large degree fluid.
The Romantics take this to new heights by constantly telling new stories
about their past based on whatever whim or mood happens to strike them.
Since they believe there's no objective external reality,
they're free to interpret things in the world and their past and anyway they please.
Kierkegaard points out that the Romantics were not interested in history per
se that is about concrete sources and evidence for what actually happened,
but rather old legends, myths,
and fairy tales that came from the past,
but were not regarded as having any objective truth.
Again, Kierkegaard acknowledges the correctness of Hegel's criticism
of Schlegel and his correct understanding of the actuality of history.
For Hegel, there are
certain inescapable elements of history that one can't simply play with at random.
There's an objective meaning or logos in the development of human history,
and it's not just the different arbitrary interpretations of individuals.
Kierkegaard refers to the Romantic slogan of
living poetically to capture the view of the ironist.
This might be taken to mean that a person
has good taste for art and makes this a part of his lifestyle,
but this isn't the main thing that is meant with this year.
Instead, to be poetic in this sense means to write fiction,
though in this case, to live is if one's life were a fiction.
So, living poetically refers to someone who's
constantly able to make up his life anew at any given moment.
To create his life anew as if he were telling a fictional story.
The element of fiction is key here since it shows that
the Romantic ironist is in no way bound to anything in actuality.
There's no factual element of his existence that he recognizes as having any validity.
Everything is a fiction that he can interpret and reinterpret as he pleases.
Kierkegaard is critical of this view since he believes
that there are certain irrevocable facts of existence,
for example, that we are beings created by God.
This is not something that we can choose to reinterpret at random.
We're created beings and in this sense are dependent on good.
This consequently presents a certain goal in life that Christians try to achieve.
The Romantic ironist, however,
recognizes no such objective facts or
existence and no such goal beyond the finite ones that he himself posits.
Kierkegaard goes on to examine in some detail
Friedrich von Schlegel's appropriation of Fichte's conception of the subject.
Kierkegaard follows Hegel by singling out
a specific work that he takes to be representative of Schlegel's position.
Namely, his novel, Lucinde,
which was originally published in 1799.
The novel traces the love of the young man Julius and his beloved Lucinde.
Schlegel's goal was to celebrate
the free passionate romantic love of his fictional couple.
True love can only be found in the unrestrained spontaneous ecstasy of
individuals and can't be governed by other concerns such as prudence,
respectability, familial connections, or financial concerns.
When this book appeared,
it was the source of some controversy since it was
regarded as immoral and offensive to bourgeois values.
Its illusions to the sexual relations between Julius and
his lovers were considered scandalous by the standards of the day.
In the work, Julius is portrayed as someone who doesn't respect the rules of society.
He speaks openly about seducing different women
including a young innocent girl and an elite prostitute,
but these affairs leave Julius depressed and disillusioned.
Only when he finds his true love Lucinde is he redeemed.
The novel is thus about showing health Julius finds
what might be called a new immediacy that is how
we can discover the true spontaneous spark of
love in a mature relationship with a woman whom he respects.
Julius thus finds its place in the world again after having lost it.
Schlegel's views that it's the rise of bourgeois society that's stifled true love.
According to this view,
there was an earlier period in human history when men and
women spontaneously came together based on natural inclination.
They were not motivated by things such as increasing their fortune,
securing errors, or allying themselves with richer powerful families.
Instead, their personal love for the other person was their sole concern.
Kierkegaard takes this view to be somewhat naive.
Schlegel and the Romantics pretend to want to reconstruct this idyllic age,
but in fact, this is a fiction that they have created.
They suppose that this is a real attempt to return to a historical past,
but instead, it's a positive-sum an unrealistic Utopian future.
There never was a time when human motives were so
pure and it's difficult to imagine a time when they ever will be so.
Kierkegaard also points out that there's a contradiction in Schlegel's idea.
On the one hand, the work Lucinde is supposed to celebrate
a naive pristine conception of spontaneous immediate love.
But then, on the other hand,
the critical view found in the book is intended to
undermine bourgeois morality concerning questions of love and marriage,
but this criticism is far from naive and spontaneous.
Rather, it's the result of
careful philosophical consideration and sophisticated social critique.
However, the main criticism that Kierkegaard wants to level against Schlegel,
is that the novel Lucinda,
is not just an attack on a specific idea or value,
but rather, it's an attempt to undermine all ethics.
The view presented is that all ethics and values
inherited from traditional culture are ultimately arbitrary,
and so the romantic ironist is at his liberty to reject them and create his own.
Moreover, the bourgeois ethics associated with love and
marriage are even repulsive and detrimental.
So, the ironist sees himself as leading a campaign of liberation against this.
But this absolute negativity is indiscriminating.
Since it criticizes ethics in general,
its critique is aimed not just against
those elements of bourgeois ethics that are worthy of criticism,
but also against those elements that are sound and true.
In this sense Schlegel's criticism is unjustified.
We saw that Kierkegaard uses the phrase "Living Poetically" to describe the ironist.
In this section known Schlegel he explains in more depth what this entails.
We need to be careful here since from this it's clear that he
doesn't mean what we usually referred to as poetry.
This might also be translated as living
aesthetically and the sense of making up one's own life
with artistic sensitivity in contrast to
slavishly following the rules and conventions of society.
Kierkegaard writes, "If we ask what poetry is,
we may say in general that it's a victory over the world;
it is through a negation of
the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up higher actuality."
So, to live politically,
is to reject traditional customs, values,
and habits when regard to flawed and defective and deposit one zone.
In this way when negates the world of actuality.
That is the world of established custom.
In addition, we create a higher actuality for oneself.
That is we create a new set of values that are not
contradictory and flood in the way the traditional values are.
According to Kierkegaard, Schlegel's attempt to undermine bourgeois ethics
in the name of something higher is ultimately unsuccessful,
since the ethics that the book Lucinda,
seems to advocate is one of sensual pleasure.
While there may admittedly be problems with some aspects of bourgeois ethics,
the simple striving for immediate pleasure of
the senses can hardly be considered a higher ethical state.
The ideological plea that motivates the work is one of
freedom in the emancipation from the repression of society.
But in exchange when gets instead a base slavery to
the natural drives and the need to satisfy the senses,
this can hardly be seen as a higher form of freedom.
It should be noted that while Kierkegaard was working on this material,
he was engaged to Regina Olsen and one
wonders to what degree his reading of Schlegel's views
of love and marriage played a role in his ultimately dissolving the engagement.
In any case this analysis was highly influential for Kierkegaard since he would
come to treat the question of the pros and cons of merit in a number of his later works.
For example, in Either/Or,
the book that he wrote immediately after The Concept of Irony,
he uses elements from the character of the young Julius as a model for
the unnamed author of the first part of the work the
estate who defends the view of romantic love,
and for his picture of the seducer in The Diary of a seducer.
He also creates the figure of Judge William as the author of the second part of the work.
The judge, a varied civil servant defends the virtues of love
within the institution of marriage in bourgeois society.
Here, Kierkegaard can be seen to incorporate
elements of the view of the mature Julius in Schlegel's novel.
The book, Either/Or is a dialogue between these two worldviews.
But the dialogue actually begin in the second part of The Concept of Irony.
An important figure in the Danish Golden Age was Poul Martin Moller,
who's often thought to have been one of Kierkegaard's great mentors.
Moller was among other things a scholar of
classical studies who helped to inspire Kierkegaard's love of the ancient Greeks.
It's quite possible that Moller encouraged Kierkegaard to write about the notion
of irony and Socrates for his dissertation.
Moller lives in this white building just on
the other side of the courthouse from Kierkegaard's family apartment.
Moller had been professor of philosophy in Norway from 1826
to 1830 before assuming a position at the University of Copenhagen,
where he taught from 1831 until his death in 1838.
Moller was Kierkegaard's professor and there's
some evidence that the two cultivated a friendship.
There can be no doubt that Moller exercised a powerful influence upon Kierkegaard.
Evidence of this influence can be seen from the fact that
Kierkegaard dedicated the Concept of Anxiety to Moller.
In that dedication, Kierkegaard refers to Moller
as among other things the confidant of Socrates.
Kierkegaard also wrote a very flattering passage about
Moller in the concluding unscientific postscript.
Moller died in 1838,
couple of months before Kierkegaard's father.
These deaths caused the great inner stirring and Kierkegaard.
It's thought that Moller's death changed Kierkegaard's attitude towards his own life.
In the first years of his university studies,
he wasn't necessarily the most hard working of students.
He was interested much more in the theatre,
literature, expensive clothes than in his studies.
Since he came from a rich family,
he was under no pressure to complete a degree to
secure for himself a livelihood or profession.
It was only after the death of Moller and Kierkegaard's father in 1838,
that he began to work seriously.
After a couple of years, he finished his studies with
his master's thesis The Concept of Irony in 1841.
Why was Moller so important for Kierkegaard's dissertation?
Shortly before his death,
Moller had himself been developing his own ideas about irony.
In his posthumously published works there's
a draft of what seems to have been planned as a larger work on this subject.
The draft bears the same title as Kierkegaard's thesis literally on The Concept of Irony.
In this text, Moller discusses many of
the philosophical aspects of irony that Kierkegaard comes to treat in his work.
Specifically, Moller's particularly interested in criticizing
the romantics use of irony as a weapon to attack modern bourgeois culture.
In this context, he treats for example the theories of
the German philosophers Hegel and [inaudible] both
of whom play an important role for Kierkegaard's analysis as well.
Moller criticizes the irony of the romantics arguing that
it "Necessarily ends in an absence of all content,
in a moral nihilism."
Here, Møller, Kierkegaard's great mentor,
clearly anticipates some of the main features of Kierkegaard's work,
The Concept of Irony.
Indeed, the work might even have been conceived with Møller as a kind of adviser,
and then after his death,
completed so as to work out some of
the insights that Møller was only beginning to develop.
In his journal, DD,
Kierkegaard recounts a conversation that he had with Møller perhaps in this very house.
He notes that this took place on June the 30th,
1837, less than a year before Møller's death.
The discussion concerned Socrates,
and some of the key topics were irony and humor.
Moreover, the comparison was also made between Socrates and Jesus.
All of these are elements that we can find in Kierkegaard's work,
The Concept of Irony, some four years later.
I'm joined here again
today by Professor Brian Soderquist.
Brian, we know that Poul Martin Møller was interested in questions of relativism,
subjectivism, nihilism, there's the idea that there's no ultimate meaning.
Could you tell us a little bit about his interest in nihilism, for example?
Yes, true. Poul Martin Møller was indeed interested in nihilism.
He was one of the first in Denmark to use the term nihilism,
and this was really 50 years before it
became a common philosophical concept through Nietzsche and others.
But he tied his concept of nihilism to to the German romantics,
and specifically, to the German romantics understanding of
what it means to be an artist or an author.
As Møller thought, the German romantics, including Schlegel,
assumed that they could create a self,
their very own self-identity in the same way that they create fictional characters.
Likewise, assumes that they could create the setting for
that character in the same way that an author can
create the setting for a fictional character.
So, in that sense,
Møller saw or sensed that there was something that they had misunderstood,
or something that they had dismissed nihilistically.
Some of those elements simply can't be dismissed,
namely our time and our place and our embodiment.
So, on the one hand,
Møller ties his critique of the German romantics to our embodiment,
something that can't be dismissed.
With this embodiment, he's thinking particularly of the fact
that we find ourselves in a time and a place,
and with a very real emotional life with what he calls a kind of primitivity,
a kind of way of being in the world that can't simply be dismissed,
and something that's not in our full control
of as an author might be in control of a character.
Secondly, he's critical of the romantics because
he thinks they overlook the fact that actuality, he calls it,
or our given setting is not something that we can simply
erase as an author can erase a character setting.
We're thrown into a historical context in a social environment
with a long history of values and customs, traditions and habits.
He calls attention to the fact that we simply
have to negotiate with those. We can't start over.
Kierkegaard concludes The Concept of Irony with a short chapter
entitled Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony.
After the detailed analysis that he's explored in the body of the work,
this brief conclusion strikes the reader as almost perfunctory.
Here, he presents his own view of irony in
contrast to both Socratic irony and Romantic irony.
Scholars argue about the meaning of this chapter since there are
certain elements of it that can be read themselves as being ironic.
Thus, what Kierkegaard seems to be presenting the conclusions to the work,
some interpreters think that at the same time,
he seems to be pointing in a different direction.
Kierkegaard begins this chapter with an analysis of irony in the context of art,
and he mentions a few authors who,
in his opinion, have made use of it correctly.
Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Danish author, Johan Ludvig Heiberg.
His main claim here is that these poets are great because
they embody what Kierkegaard calls a totality view of the world.
By this, he seems to mean that they have
an overarching consistent worldview that allows them to organize their art.
In their poems, they're able to organize and balance
a large number of different elements in accordance with this general view.
Kierkegaard praises them since they're able to use
irony effectively as an individual element in their works.
They're able to find the right time and place for
individual instances of irony and to employ it to good effect in these cases.
In this sense, he says that they're masters of irony.
They dictate exactly when it is to be used
and construct situations where it's most appropriate.
This stands in contrast to romantic irony,
which, as we've seen, is totalizing.
The romantics are not able to control irony as one element among others,
but instead, they're in effect controlled or dominated
by it as a single overriding element.
Kierkegaard criticizes romantic irony and recommends what he calls controlled irony.
That is the use of irony in specific appropriate cases.
Kierkegaard then moves from the use of irony and art
to the more existential question of the use of irony in life.
Here, he refers to his previous formulation of living poetically.
His positive view seems to be that the true ironist is one who
generally lives in accordance with the conventions and customs of the society,
but who doesn't do so uncritically.
Rather, he isolates individual aspects of the actuality
of the society that he exposes as flawed by means of irony.
He writes, I quote,
"In our age there has been much talk
about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship,
but what doubt is to science,
irony is to personal life.
Just as scientists maintain that there is no true science without doubt,
so it may be maintained with the same right that
no genuinely human life is possible without irony."
This is presumably in part a reference to
Martensen's claim that philosophy must begin with doubt,
with the slogan De Omnibus Dubitandum Est,
or one must doubt everything.
Kierkegaard seems to be saying that to be truly human,
we must all, at some point,
pass through a phase of critical reflection where we subject
our inherited beliefs and practices to
critical examination and reject those that are erroneous.
Kierkegaard thus implicitly agrees with Socrates' famous claim,
that the unexamined life is not worth living,
or put differently, the unexamined life
fails to develop fully the faculties that are unique to human beings.
Kierkegaard thus says that irony is the absolute beginning of personal life.
By using irony in a controlled manner,
the individual can have
a reflective critical distance on one's culture in the established order of
things without trying to destroy it and
alienating one's self from it in the same way that the romantics do.
In one of the most important passages in all of Kierkegaard's writings,
he connects this view of controlled irony with Christianity.
He says that it's particularly in his own day,
the irony of this kind is important.
He critically recalls the important scientific advances of the time and notes quote,
"Knowledge not only about the secrets of the human race but even about the secrets of
God is offered for sale at such a bargain price today that it all looks very dubious.
In our joy over the achievement in our age,
we have forgotten that an achievement is worthless if it is not made of one's own."
Here, he implicitly recalls Socrates and the importance of subjective knowing.
Kierkegaard's contemporaries, like those of Socrates,
claimed to have astonishing knowledge about a number of different things.
But this knowledge can't be accepted at face value.
Rather, it must be examined by each individual
and appropriated by each and every one of us on our own.
What Kierkegaard here calls the secrets of
God can't be learned as a form of objective knowledge,
but instead, it must be appropriated inwardly by each individual.
This is one of the central issues that will
recur in some of Kierkegaard's most famous works.
Irony comes in when one wishes to criticize what Kierkegaard takes to be
the mistaken view that we can know the secrets of God objectively.
He believes that this view,
which is widely held in his own day,
is worthy of ironic criticism.
Thus, irony has an important role to play in the modern world.
In a profoundly provocative passage,
Kierkegaard plays on the words of Jesus who says in John Chapter 14,
Verse 6, "I am the way,
and the truth, and the life."
Kierkegaard modifies this and writes,
"Irony as the negative is the way;
it's not the truth but the way."
Here, he emphasizes the negative aspect of irony,
the aspect that he's argued for throughout the work in reference to Socrates.
Irony doesn't construct or build something positive, but rather,
it's important because it's negative,
because it criticizes and tears down.
The implication seems to be that irony is
an essential element for coming to Christianity.
First, one must use irony in order to undermine the mistaken conceptions of
Christianity which conceive of it as a positive and objective doctrine.
Then once this has been done,
one can have the proper relation to Christianity by means of inward appropriation.
So, irony, as a negative force,
is not the truth itself, but rather,
it prepares the individual to find the truth on one's own.
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