[MUSIC] [SOUND]. An important figure for the young Kierkegaard during his days as a student at the University of Copenhagen was a man named Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Heiberg came from an intellectual family, was a leading poet, dramatist and literally critic in Denmark in the 1830s and 40s. As a child, he lived for a time in this house, called The Hill House, which belonged to the literary scholar Knud Lyhne Rahbek, who was a close friend of [INAUDIBLE] 's father, who had been exiled from the Danish kingdom. Rahbek's home was known as one of the great literary salons of Golden Age Copenhagen. When he was older, Heiberg went to paris where he studied French Vaudeville, which he brought to the stage of the royal theater in Copenhagen when he came back. He was the editor of the leading journal for aesthetics and criticism of the age called [FOREIGN] or Copenhagen's Flying Post. It was in this journal that Kierkegaard published his first articles. Hieberg's wife, Johanne Luise Heiberg, was a leading actress of the day and Kierkegaard;s article The Crisis and the Crisis in the Life of an Actress is dedicated to analysis of her art. Hieberg's mother, Thomasine Buntzen, known as Madam Gyllembourg. Was a popular novelist. In Kierkegaard's work of literary review examines her novel Two Ages. Heiberg's many interests also included philosophy which he used among other things to try to ground his theory of ascetics. Heiberg's philosophical orientation came from his experience with Hegel's philosophy. he learned about Hegel when he was working as lecturer at the University of Kiel. He became so interested in what he read that he went to Berlin in 1824 and attended Hegel's lectures. This was an exciting period at the University of Berlin when Hegel's power was at it's height and he was surrounded by a large number of adoring students who came from all over Europe Heiberg's first encounters with Heigel was one of the great revelations of his life. He describes this as a kind of epiphany that he experienced on his return from Berlin to Kiel. Heiberg returned to Copenhagen and began to make a campaign to introduce Heigel's philosophy to his fellow countrymen. As a part of those campaigns, He wanted to give a series of private lectures on the subject. To announce this he published a short pamphlet in March of 1833 entitled, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. This work presents some of the basics of Hegel's philosophy and issued an invitation for interested students to sign up for the lectures. Heiberg begins the treaties by claiming that the present age is in a state of crisis. According to his hellian theory of history, there are different periods or epochs of history, each of which has its own values, traditions and world views. The period offers the people at the time a stable picture of reality that they can use to understand the world and their lives. However, from time to time, as history develops, and new ways of thinking, scientific discoveries appear, the stable points of orientation of a given period begin to falter. Then a period of crisis begins which results the collapse of the reigning world view. In this crisis, people begin to feel uncertain and anxious that they no longer have any firm points on which to base their existence. Heiberg's diagnosis of his own time is that it is in a state of crisis. In the wake of the tumults caused by the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, people had lost their belief in traditional institutions and practices. The Enlightenment criticized monarchical power, which had held sway in Europe for centuries. It rejected traditional belief as superstition. And tried to undermine the power of the church. According to Hyburn, the result of this is subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism. People didn't know what to believe in any longer. He says that a similar crisis took place during the Roman Empire when Institutions from past ages continued to exist, but they were empty since, no-one didn't believe in them anymore. He writes, they were quote, like a ghost from past ages, which had lost all meaning in the present. He explains, that in this condition, People quote felt abandoned by all gods, since the entire world of gods was dead. While he says this about the Roman world, the implication is clear. This is a problem of his own age as well. Heiberg's claim is that in his own day people have become uncertain about what use to be fixed points of human existence. In, for example, religion or in philosophy. The age must ultimately find a solution before it collapses into a complete relativism or nihilism. This is for Heiberg, the great challenge of the day. [SOUND]. In Kierkegaard's Chapter, The World Historical Validity of Irony, he takes up Heiberg's understanding of the development of history Through periods of stability and crisis. He follows Heiberg by claiming that the world views of the periods of history are transient and mutable. He writes and I quote, the given actuality at a certain time is the actuality valid for the generation and the individuals in that generation. But then when the old world views ceased to be plausible, "this actuality must be displaced by another actuality, and this must occur through and by individuals and the generation.". So just like Hieberg, Kierkegaard claims that the changes in the world views take place by individuals ceasing to believe in the key elements that sustain the common culture. His goal is to understand the use of irony historically, at times when a given world view is in crisis. Instead of talking about a world view of a specific people or period, Kierkegaard uses the world existence and actuality to capture this. He explains the situation of a person using irony in a time When a culture's traditions and values are starting to crumble. In such a situation, "the whole of existence has become alien to the ironic subject and the ironic subject in turn alien to existence.". And as a result, "actuality has lost its validity for the ironic subject.". The person using irony does so since he or she feels alienated from mainstream traditions and values. The ironist is able to see that these traditions and values are not firmly grounded and no longer have credibility. If this concerns many different aspects of one's culture, then suddenly one feels alienated from everything and from the actuality of one's time. Kierkegaard points out that there are two aspects of this development, quote, the new must forge ahead and quote, the old must be displaced. There are people in any given age of crisis who perceive the crisis very clearly. Kierkegaard follows Heiberg on this point, since Heiberg separates the intellectuals of the age from the common masses, claiming that the great minds of the period are the ones leading the vanguard of humanity out of the crisis and into the new age. They have some intuition about the new period that will emerge from the crisis. This is what Kierkegaard describes as the prophetic individual. Heiberg calls these people the educated or cultured people, and in his own age, he identifies two figures as the leaders of humanity, urging everyone on to embrace a new world view, Goethe and Hegel. For Kirkegaard the ironist is the one who perceives the present crisis clearly. But the ironist has no clear picture of what the future will hold. He has only vague intuitions. Thus his goal is not to construct that future, he sees only the contradictions of the present and tries to make these clear to other people in order to precipitate the crisis that will lead to the new age. The ironist points to the future without knowing concretely what it is. Kierkegaard follows what Hieberg describes at the beginning of On the Significance of Philosophy in the Present Age, when he talks about the common culture striving, quote, powerfully forward in manifold directions without anyone really knowing where it will lead. Hieberg talks about the educated and cultivated people of any given period. Being those who are prophetic in the sense of catching a fleeting glimpse of the new age beyond the means of the present. For Kierkegaard, it's precisely from this educated class, that the ironist comes. Kierkegaard talks about the ironist as, quote, a sacrifice that the world process demands. By this, he means that in any age of crisis, there will be people who use irony to try to tear away at the decaying structure of the present. Such people will invariably be resented and disdained by those of of their contemporaries who try to hold on firmly to the structure. As a result, such prophetic ironies are often subject to persecution. Kierkegaard describes the ironist as negatively free in the sense that the ironist is free from the usual demands of custom and tradition. Indeed the ironist regards the rest of society as unreflective slaves to customary patterns of behavior. There's this agreed sense of liberation to know that one is longer subject to such constraints of society. And that the wide world of possibility lies open. One can dress, speak, and act in any way that one wishes and there's no need to conform to the usual social norms. This give the ironist the sense that there is in fact something new that replaces what's been destroyed. The key for Kierkegaard is that Dionysius must feel the sense of freedom vis-a-vis the established order of things. He writes, quote, Face-to-face with the given actuality, the subjectivity feels its power, its validity and meaning. This is what Hegel referred to as subjective freedom. One must realize that absolute and irreducible value of the individual and its rights. This is not something that's simply given, but rather it develops historically. Our understanding of what human beings are as individuals has changed radically over time and the principle of subjective freedom has come to be realized. This leads Kierkegaard in a key passage to conclude quote, insofar as this irony is world-historically justified, the subjectivity's emancipation is carried out in the service of the idea. So for Kierkegaard, the point of irony is not simply to make fun of people or to engage in irony for its own sake. Instead, the justification for irony from a historical perspective is that it is used to focus on and develop the principle of subjective freedom. It is in the service of this idea. This was the mission of Socrates. Indeed, it was Hegel's interpretation that Socrates was the first to begin to develop subjective freedom historically. Hegel contrasts Socratic irony in the irony of the German Romantics, and here we see a key idea behind Kierkegaard's work, the concept of irony. Which provides an analysis in comparison of exactly these two forms of irony. Hegel points out that while the romantics turn to Socrates to justify their use of irony, this use is quite different from that of Socrates himself. In his lectures, Hegel associates romantic irony with Friedrich von Schlegel asked in the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, all three of whom are discussed by Kierkegaard in his work. According to Hegel, these authors wished to use irony as a purely negative tool to tear down any idea, custom, belief, insutution, tradition, and so forth. In other words, Irony can be used in the service of relativism or nihilism to criticize anything and everything. The Romantics have extended the Socratic Principle to a universal one, but for Hegel, Socrates's goal was not to destroy for the sheer joy of destroying, but rather, in order to reach the truth. For Hegel it's a mistake to understand Socrates is the originator of this kind of irony. It's true that Socrates placed the focus on the individual and subjectivity but this was very different from the understanding of subjectivity in the romantics. Hegel's critical of the romantics since he sees them as relativists who simply try to assert their own whimsical views and opinions In opposition to accepted custom and tradition. Hegel imagines an advocate of this position who says and I "it is I who through my educated thoughts can annul all determinations of right, morality, good, etc., because I am clearly master of them, and I know that if anything seems good to me I can easily subvert it, because things are only true to me in so far as they please me now.". The romantic can also change his view at will when it no longer continues to please him. While it's true that for Socrates, the individual must reach the truth for him or herself, this doesn't mean that the truth is something that's arbitrary or relative to each individual. It doesnt justify self satisfied enjoyment of ones own private truth at the expense of a publicly accepted one. Socrates doesn't arrogantly belive that his views are superior to those of other people. Unlike the romantics he doesnt openly mock accepted custom and tradition. Hegel thus concludes that Socrates' irony is, quote, a manner of speech, a pleasant rallying, or in the translation of Kierkegaard's quotation of it in The Concept of Irony, a manner of conversation, sociable pleasantry. This stands in contrast to the Romantics' satirical laughter or pretense. Which treats the idea as though it, quote, were nothing but a joke. Kierkegaard then turns to Hegel's treatment of irony. He points out that Hegel's generally a quite consistent critic of irony, especially in its modern form in the German Romantics. Indeed, Hegel is highly political in his treatment of figures such as Friedrich von Schleiden. Kierkegaard seems to have a mixed assessment of this. On the one hand, he agrees with Hegel's criticism of these figures as relativists, and takes Hegel to have performed an important service by criticizing them. He writes, and I quote, It's one of Hegel's great merits that he halted or at least wanted to halt the prodigal sons of speculation on their way to perdition. But then, on the other hand he thinks that Hegel's overly critical of the romantics and this leads him to fail to see the truth of irony. Kierkegaard thinks that since Hegel has no patience whatsoever for romantic irony, he's unable to distinguish this from other forms of irony. In short, Hegel throws together all forms of irony into one negative idea, which he proceeds to criticize. But by doing so, he fails to appreciate Socratic irony, which is a different form of irony. Kierkegaard thinks that Hegel completely misses the point of Socrates' irony when he describes it as merely a manner of conversation, sociable pleasantry. This fails to recognize the deeper underlying point of Socrates' use of irony. Kierkegaard's main criticism is that Hegel in the end ascribes something positive to Socrates. In other words for Hegel, the goal for Socrates' irony was simply to start up a discussion that would lead to a determination of the concept or the universal. But, Kierkegaard claims that Socrates' negativity through and through. His goal is not to construct something, but rather, to negate. It's important to appreciate just how counterintuitive Kierkegaard's position is here. Usually if there's a problem, our immediate instinct is to try to solve it. If there's a question of a concept, then our goal is to try to define it. We're uncomfortable in remaining in a situation with unresolved problems or uncertain situations. We naturally want to try to resolve them. But Kierkegaard 's position is just the opposite of this. For Kierkegaard, resolving something or constructing something is not beneficial to the individual, rather, it's a terrible disservice. If you cure doubt, or assuage the pain of nihilism by providing an answer, you rob the individual of his own subjective responsibility to search for the truth. This is even worse if what you construct as truth isn't even true which is what Kierkegaard regarded the sophists to be doing in Socrates' time and what he regarded the priests and the academics to be doing in his own time. Kierkegaard's Socrates is negative that is in a sense annalist but that's all right. This frees the subject to search for the truth subjectively. The key difference between Kierkegaard's Socrates and Kierkegaard's Romantics is that Socrates doesn't stop the search or cynically make up the truth, like Kierkegaard's Romantics. [MUSIC]
