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Hello, and welcome to the second lecture of Soren Kierkegaard, Subjectivity, Irony,

and the Crisis of Modernity.

In the first lecture we learned that there were a number of important aspects

of the thought of Socrates that were a great inspiration for Kierkegaard.

We talked about Socratic irony, the idea of aporia.

Socrates' role as the gadfly of Athens, Socrates' daemon, and

finally, Socrates' so called maieutic art.

It was useful to see these concepts in their original context

in Plato's dialogues since this will give us a greater appreciation for

Kierkegaard's unique use of them.

But, we still have one brief errand to attend to before we get to this.

Kierkegaard's understanding of Socrates was of course

based on his reading of the text of Plato, Xenophon, and

Aristophanes, that is, the primary Greek sources.

But, it was also largely shaped by the interpretation of the famous

German philosopher Hegel with whom he

was in a constant critical dialogue in the concept of irony.

Hegel's philosophy was a highly popular trend at the University of Copenhagen in

the late 1830s when Kierkegaard was a student and was writing this work.

So, in this lecture, we'll explore first the presence of Hegel at the university

during Kierkegaard's time, and then we'll go through Hegel's analysis of Socrates

treating the same topics that we introduced last time.

That is Socratic irony, aporia, the daemon, and so forth.

We'll see how Kierkegaard is inspired and influenced by the important

historical role that Hegel ascribes

to the person of Socrates.

What does it mean to say that we are autonomous?

For most people today, autonomy is just a fancy word for freedom.

Literally, autonomy just means that one is able to give a lot of oneself.

In other words, one can decide for oneself what one wishes to do.

So to say that someone is not autonomous means that that person

is subject to external laws that often contradict what one wants to do.

So in this sense, we all generally think that autonomy is a good thing

just as we think that freedom is a good thing.

I don't want someone telling me what to do or imposing arbitrary rules and

regulations on me that limit my freedom.

Today, autonomy is conceived as a universally positive thing, but

this was not always the case.

In some societies, the main value was not for

people to go out and act on their own desires and wishes.

Instead, the most important thing was for them to follow a set of rules that had

been agreed upon by one's family, culture, or society.

This includes dressing in a certain way or acting in accordance with accepted norms.

According to this view, to act autonomously is a sign of arrogance and

disregard for one's family or tradition.

This is often associated with religion.

For example, in religious ceremonies, everyone is expected to do the same thing,

to perform the same ceremony in the same way.

It's impossible to be an individualist or a nonconformist in a ceremonial context.

Moreover, in Christianity, it's thought that human beings are finite and sinful.

They are only able to gain salvation,

not by their own acts alone but by the grace of God.

It's therefore considered, not just arrogant,

but even irreligious to act as if one could determine the truth for oneself.

In this sense, autonomy is conceived as a negative thing.

This issue, which is still very much alive today,

was one that was important in Kierkegaard's time.

It was thematized by a young Danish scholar named Hans Lassen Martensen.

When Kierkegaard was a student here at the University of Copenhagen in the 1830s,

the philosophy of the German philosopher Hegel became a major trend among students.

A key figure for the popularity of Hegel was Martensen

who was just five years older than Kierkegaard.

In 1836, Martensen returned to Copenhagen from a two year trip

that he took to Berlin, Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, and Paris.

On his trip, Martensen met most of the leading figures in Prussia and

the German states who were discussing Hegel's philosophy at this time.

When he returned to Copenhagen,

Martensen immediately began an illustrious academic career.

On July 12th, 1837, he defended his dissertation,

which was entitled On the Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness.

In this work, he critically treated the systems of the German thinkers,

Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.

Martensen argued that these philosophies all represented systems of autonomy

that he believed focused one-sidely on the power of the individual.

According to Martensen,

this fails to recognize the profound dependency of human beings on God.

With this topic, Martensen can, in a sense,

be said to anticipate Kierkegaard's topic of irony.

In both cases, what's at issue is the role of the individual or

the subject vis-a-vis the objective order of things.

Both Martensen and Kierkegaard seem to be in agreement that modern subjectivity or

even relativism has gone too far.

Martensen's key term for this is modern autonomy where Kierkegaard's is irony,

but in the end, they're talking about the same set of issues.

Martensen began lecturing at the University of Copenhagen in the fall

of 1837.

It was here at Regensen College

that he defended his dissertation in the same year.

His courses soon became the talk of the entire university.

Students from all disciplines flocked to hear what he had to say since he was in

a sense giving an account of what he had learned on his trip about the most recent

developments in philosophy and theology in the German speaking states.

To the consternation and amazement of the older, more conservative faculty,

Martensen immediately became a kind of academic celebrity.

To the students, he was an exciting young scholar who could speak to them

in a way that they had not experienced before.

He presented to them the basic ideas of the philosophy of Hegel

which all of Prussia and Germany was talking about.

One of Martensen's students

describes his encounter with these lectures as his intellectual awakening.

He writes, and I quote, the man, who through his lectures made such a strong

impression on me and many others was a young instructor, who had been appointed

to give lectures on the recent history of philosophy for us first-year students.

It was Hans Lassen Martensen.

He brought new life into the new university building.

Martensen for many years filled the largest auditoriums with nothing but

zealous auditors.

What immediately won me over to him was the fresh enthusiasm

which surrounded him in comparison to the other instructors.

He spoke precisely about what I thirsted to hear, and did so at times with a warmth

which I found doubly impressive in the cold temple of the sciences.

Among the students in Martensen's lecture hall was the young Soren Kierkegaard.

His notes to Martensen's course can be found in his Notebook 4.

Here, Kierkegaard could witness firsthand the sensation that Hegel and

German philosophy were making among his fellow students.

He was vexed by Martensen's success and

frustrated by the avid interest that his fellow students showed in these lectures.

While Kierkegaard clearly felt alienated from the group of students that

followed Martensen around, he knew that he had to take seriously the thought of

Hegel if he was going to write a dissertation on irony

since Hegel had treated this topic in a handful of different texts.

So he read carefully Hegel's lectures with a special eye to the different treatments

of Socrates and Socratic irony.

So why was Hegel so interesting to the students of Kierkegaard's generation?

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770,

and he spent the last decade of his life at the royal

Friedrich Wilhelms University which is today the Humboldt University in Berlin.

His lectures there in the 1820s to students from all over Europe.

After he died on November 14, 1831, his students formed a society

dedicated to publishing a complete edition of his works.

They believed that Hegel's lectures constituted an important

aspect of his thought.

And so, in their edition, they decided to publish four series of his lectures,

along with the works that Hegel had published in his own lifetime.

These were the lectures on the philosophy of religion, the lectures on aesthetics.

The lectures on the philosophy of history, and finally,

the lectures on the history of philosophy.

Kierkegaard owned copied of all of these works, and

in The Concept of Irony he refers to or quotes directly three of the four.

Hegel's most extended account of Socrates appears in the first volume

of the three volume Lectures on the History of Philosophy which appeared

from 1833 to 1836 edited by Hegel's student Karl Ludwig Michelet.

We want to look at Hegel's analysis and see how it's relevant for

Kierkegaard's understanding of Socrates in The Concept of Irony.

In his investigation,

Hegel makes use of the three main sources of Socrates life and teachings.

The philosopher Plato, the historian Xenophon,

and the comic writer Aristophanes.

These are the same three sources that Kierkegaard uses in his analysis of

Socratic irony in The Concept of Irony.

Why were people so interested in Hegel's philosophy?

Was it simply the latest philosophical trend, or

was there really something important about it that spoke to people at the time?

In Hegel's lectures, he portrays Socrates as what he calls

a mental turning point in the history of philosophy and culture.

The Greek philosophers prior to Socrates, the so called Presocratic philosophers,

were concerned with understanding the world of nature.

They were, in a sense, the first natural scientists who tried to

give natural explanations of the world without appealing to any divine agency.

They were primarily interested in the objective world as they found it

outside themselves.

By contrast,

Socrates was the first to turn the focus inward to the realm of thought.

While the other philosophers were concerned with explaining the natural

phenomena in the world,

they didn't problematize this issue of the way people thought.

This is what Socrates did.

He believed that understanding how people thought was prior to and

more important than understanding the natural world.

For in order to understand the natural world

we must first know what it is to understand something at all.

According to Hegel, this marked a revolutionary idea,

not just in Greek philosophy but in Greek culture generally.

The Greeks were accustomed to living in accordance with time honored customs,

habits, that they took to be divinely sanctioned.

This is the broad sphere of what Hegel calls,

in German, sittlichkeit, which is usually translated as ethics or ethical life.

By this however, he means not just the customary ethics that

a given people like the Greeks follow, but also the broad spheres of religion,

laws, traditions, and established patterns of social interaction.

For Hegel, the Greeks believed that this

obective sphere of customary ethics was true, as it were, by nature.

In other words, when they acted in accordance with tradition and

custom, this was not just the arbitrary will of some specific individual, but

rather it was true in itself.

This is the beginning of what is known today as the tradition of natural law.

That is, the idea that some things are right or wrong by nature.

According to Hegel, the conception of traditional ethical life can

be seen in Sophocles' tragedy Antigone.

In this work, a conflict arises between a young woman, Antigone,

and the king of Thebes, Creon.

Antigone's brother Polyneices has been killed in a failed revolt against

the state.

Creon decrees that the bodies of the rebels should not be buried but

rather should be left exposed to the wild animals and the elements.

Anyone caught trying to bury one of the rebels was punishable by death.

Antigone regards this is an arbitrary decree of a single man, the tyrant Creon.

This was just his personal opinion.

The fact that he's the king and

thus has the sanction of the law behind him doesn't change this.

For Antigone, there's a higher law, namely the law of the family.

The law that dictates that family members bury the dead of their deceased.

In his lectures, Hegel quotes this work and refers to Antigone.

He says that these are the eternal laws of the gods.

For Antigone, the funeral rites are absolute objective

facts of nature that she must obey even if her actions are illegal by human laws.

The laws of nature are absolute whereas human laws are arbitrary.

Hegel takes this to be exemplary through the Greek view prior to Socrates.

The revolution of thought that Socrates brought about was to shift this emphasis

on the outward objective sphere that was given by the gods as true forever,

to the inward sphere of the individual.

As Hegel explained, quote,

Socrates' principle is that man must attain to truth through himself.

Though for Socrates, one should not accept blindly what custom and tradition teach.

Instead, one must critically examine these things and

come to a conclusion about them for one's self.

But note that this doesn't mean that whatever the subject happens to

think is true and has validity.

Instead, Hegel believes that there's still an objective truth but that it must be

reached and recognized by the individual subject through rational examination.

The problem with the Greek view, prior to Socrates,

was that the sphere of accepted custom and tradition was, in a sense, tyrannical.

This was claimed to be true in itself, and

one's own personal opinion about it didn't matter.

For Antigone, it's an absolute truth that the surviving family members

must give the funeral rights to deceased relatives.

It doesn't matter what Creon or anyone else thinks about this.

It's simply true in and of itself.

But for Socrates and for the modern view,

each individual has the right to give his or her assent to the truth.

This recognizes the rationality of the individual to know and

understand the truth.

So the revolution that Socrates began in the Greek world and that led to our modern

conception is that the subject is a constitutive element of the truth.

This was a revolution among the Greeks since it was a new and

shocking idea, indeed an idea that cost Socrates his life.

[SOUND] The idea of a subjective truth was one that

greatly appealed to the young Kierkegaard.

In the summer of 1835, he came here to Northern Sealand, to the north of

Copenhagen, where he visited the small towns and villages at his leisure.

He records his impressions from the short journey in his first

journal called simply, The Journal AA.

This is an important period for the young student, Kierkegaard, who seemed not

really to be making particularly rapid progress with his studies.

One reason for this was perhaps that he was still somewhat unsure about what he

wanted to do with his life.

In the journal, AA, he recounts some of his self-doubts and

uncertainties about which course of life to take.

On August 1, 1835, here in the fishing village of Gilleleje,

he writes, "What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do,

not what I must know...It's a question of understanding my destiny,

of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth

which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and

die." Here, the young Kierkegaard states explicitly that

he urgently needs to discover a subjective personal truth, as he says a truth for me.

Like Socrates, he rejects the objective truths that are accepted by society.

He continues, "...what use would it be

in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or

if I worked my way through the philosophers' systems...And what use would

it be in that respect to be able to work out a theory of the state....which I

myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see?" Here,

he rejects the objective knowledge that's recognized by the world.

He acknowledges that this enjoys respect and recognition among people,

but since it's objective, it lacks something fundamental.

Thus, like Socrates, he wants to find a truth within himself.

[SOUND] It's particularly interesting to note the way, in which,

Kierkegaard also includes Christianity in his account of the objective truth.

He writes, "What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of

Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for

myself and my life?" Here, he recognizes that Christianity can be regarded

as something external and outward, as one objective truth among others.

The academic fields of theology, such as dogmatics or

church history, might be thought to fall into this category.

For example, what some church council decided isn't objective fact, but

this has nothing to do with the individual's relation to Christianity.

Like Socrates, Kierkegaard believes that the deeper truth is not the objective one,

but rather, the subjective one that lies within.

He connects this directly with Socrates, a few pages later.

For Kierkegaard, as for Socrates,

knowledge of external things is irrelevant without knowledge of oneself as subject.

He writes, "One must first learn to know oneself before

knowing anything else...Only when the person has inwardly understood himself,

and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and

meaning." Kierkegaard claims that one must first begin with skepticism or

irony, in order to work through it.

He writes, true knowing begins within not knowing, Socrates.

Kierkegaard refers to the way in which Socrates undermines traditional truths and

begins from the start or from a position of what he calls not knowing.

Many years later, in 1846, in the concluding unscientific post script,

Kierkegaard develops this distinction in some detail.

At the beginning of the work,

he explains that the objective issue is about the truth of Christianity.

This is the objective truth about Christianity, such as can be

determined by for example, the historical record, the sources, and so forth.

In contrast to the objective truth, there's also the subjective,

which is about the individual's relation to Christianity.

The question of ones personal inward subjective relation to Christianity is for

Kierkegaard a much deeper and more important truth than

all of the external objective truths that can be established.

This fundamental distinction between subjective and

objective, for which the post script is so well known,

finds its origins in Kierkegaard's reflections, here in Gilleleje in 1835.

And these reflections are closely related to Socrates' Revolution of Thought,

that turned away from external custom and tradition, and

gave validity to what was inward and subjective.

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Lecture 2:1 Kierkegaard, Martensen and Hegelianism

Søren Kierkegaard - Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity

Meet the Instructors