[MUSIC] As we know, Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, attempts to trace the use of irony historically. In other words, he wishes to understand how and when irony arose and how it developed over time. Today, this kind of study would fall into the heading, "history of ideas." Kierkegaard's work is something of a hybrid. On the one hand, it's not a purely historical work, since Kierkegaard isn't interested in history, per se. He's not tracing kings, wars, expeditions of discovery and things of that sort. On the other hand, it's not a purely conceptual work, either. He's not interested just in the concept of irony on its own, separated from its historical context. His work, rather, involves both elements, and this is what he discusses in his introduction. First, there's the element of the historical phenomenon, that is, the concrete use of irony by the concrete person Socrates in ancient Athens. This involves understanding Socrates in the context of the ancient Greek world and the Athenian city state. So there's an empirical element here that's based on the extant sources of Socrates' life and thought: Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes. But, second, there's also a conceptual element or an element of thought involved. History isn't simply a catalogue of raw data that's repeated to the reader for immediate consumption. Rather the sources need to be interpreted. Situations and events must be reconstructed, and connections must be inferred. Certain things need to be judged to be central and important, while others are disregarded and cast aside as irrelevant and unimportant. This is the work of the historian. In order to do this work, one must invariably make use of certain ideas, concepts, or organizational schemes to facilitate one's interpretation of the events. Kierkegaard points out that both of these elements are required to approach subject matter of this kind. It would be absurd to bury oneself in the empirical phenomena alone, and leave it at that, since this would not be illuminating in any way. The empirical data needs interpretation before it can be meaningful. Likewise, it would be absurd to focus exclusively on the conceptual side without even giving a look to the empirical phenomena since this would end in complete abstraction, and the analysis would, so to speak, float in the air away from actual existence and reality. One needs both particularity, the raw empirical data of history, and universality, the idea or concepts. Kierkegaard associates the empirical side with history and the conceptual side with philosophy. He recognizes the importance of both for his study, and I quote, "Both of them ought to have their rights so that, on the one hand, the phenomenon has its rights and is not to be intimidated and discouraged by philosophy's superiority, and philosophy, on the other hand, is not to let itself be infatuated by the charms of the particular, is not to be distracted by the superabundance of the particular." So, for Kierkegaard, both sides have their validity, and both are necessary for the kind of study that he's presenting. This is worth noting since Kierkegaard is often characterized as someone who is anti-conceptual, or someone who celebrates existence and actuality, while rejecting all forms of abstraction and theory. But here it's clear that he values ideas and concepts, but he simply believes that they must be grounded in experience or concrete phenomena. Thus the work is called not the empirical phenomenon of irony but rather The Concept of Irony. In his overview of Hegel's understanding of Socrates, Kierkegaard criticizes Hegel for placing too much emphasis on the concept and not enough on the empirical phenomena. He reproaches Hegel for not being philologically exacting in the sense that he doesn't make a close study of all the relevant sources but instead is too quick to focus on the general concept in abstraction from its concrete historical grounding. Kierkegaard implies that Hegel isn't as concerned as he should be about the details of history, but rather tries simply to give the big picture. Hegel is not worried that perhaps not all of the details from the sources fit into this big picture. He caricatures Hegel as the "commander-in-chief of world history," who just takes a royal glimpse at things before moving along. Kierkegaard believes that this leads to a distortion of the interpretation of Socrates. He thinks that Hegel's view fails to recognize the inconsistencies in the accounts of Socrates given by the ancient sources. Since Hegel observes Socrates, so to speak, from a bird's eye view, he fails to see some important details about the person of Socrates, which can't be reduced to a part of some grand historical narrative. I'm joined here today by Professor Heiko Schulz, from the Faculty of Theology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, in Germany. Professor Schulz is one of the leading international experts on Kierkegaard's relations to German philosophy and theology in the 1830s and '40s. Moreover, Professor Schulz is also in charge of an ambitious translation project where they're translating Kierkegaard's writings from Danish into German. Professor Schulz, Kierkegaard claims that methodologically, his analysis of irony takes into account the abstract concept and the concrete historical phenomena. He criticizes Hegel's account of Socrates and Socratic irony for placing too much emphasis on the concept and for not being philologically exacting with regard to the historical side. How do you understand this criticism, and do you think it's a fair one? Well, how do I understand the basic idea underlying his criticism, namely, the idea of a relation between the concrete historical phenomenon and the concept? It seems to me that both Hegel and Kierkegaard want to point out when we talk about a world-historical person, a world-historical subject such as Socrates, we could differentiate between these two aspects. Socrates actually was acting as an individual, a historical individual, talking to people. So there are very many aspects and details belonging to his historical concretions, so to speak, and that's part of what Kierkegaard calls the historical phenomenon. But at the same time, of course, Socrates is a world-historical individual. That means he's representing or bringing out or bringing about some world-historically decisive idea or concept in Hegelian terms. And it seems to me that Kierkegaard shares this basic assumption with Hegel, shares the assumption that we have to bring in both aspects and both details and maybe that there is a certain dialectic going on between the concrete historical phenomenon and the concept represented by it. So much for their common convictions with regard to this point. Now Kierkegaard seems to complain in relation to Hegel that Hegel undervalues the historical side, the concrete side, by moving over into the conceptual side all too quickly, and to a certain extent, I would agree to this because Hegel is just interested in the idea or seems to be just interested in the idea that Socrates is representing or bringing about. But then, given that Kierkegaard himself makes use of exactly this methodology, do you think that this is a fair criticism? To a certain extent I would say it is not fair. So, as I said already, they share basic methodological assumptions, say the basic dialectic between the historical phenomenon and the concept, but Kierkegaard seems to want to say that Hegel undervalues the concrete historical phenomenon of Socrates. Why does he think so? Well, because he's of the opinion that there's something very specific about this historical phenomenon of Socrates, and what is this very specific aspect? It is a combination of irony and of having a deep felt and basic interest in the good, and both Hegel and Kierkegaard agree upon this: the historical function of Socrates, of being the founder of morality, if only in this very restricted respect, that he sort of founded the principle of human conscience and other things. But Kierkegaard's problem is how does this function? How does this idea or this concept of the Socratic role, how does it relate to his historical acting in a very ironic way, at least in as much as we know from Plato's dialogues and other sources. So how does this relate to one another? How does it fit together? Being ironic, on one hand, and being basically interested in the good in an ethical sense, but that's a specific Kierkegaardian problem, it seems to me, which he unfolds in The Concept of Irony. But now he complains over against Hegel that he does not give a satisfying solution of the problem. And my impression is, Hegel doesn't give any satisfying solution because it is not his problem. So in that sense it seems that the criticism is unfair. It's not that they both give a description and a solution, and one is convincing or not. The fact is that Hegel doesn't have the same problem, so it's very natural that he doesn't come up with any solution. Kierkegaard's second criticism of Hegel has to do with Hegel's understanding of Socrates as the founder of morality. Hegel is telling a long story about the development of philosophy and Western culture. He sees Socrates as playing an important role in this development since he was the first person to realize the importance of subjective freedom. This meant that morality was not just about what was already fixed and given outwardly by one's culture, but rather it was something that was inward and concerned one's own thoughts, considerations, and conscience. This was a positive principle that entered into history at this time. According to Hegel, this was an important step in the development of human culture, and this form of morality is one of the characteristic features of the modern world. Kierkegaard is critical of this since he thinks that it's a mistake to ascribe some positive principle to Socrates. It's a mistake to think that Socrates founded some school of philosophy, or some social movement. Instead, Kierkegaard wants to insist that Socrates' service historically was entirely negative. He critically dismantled the pretension of the Sophists and the mainstream Athenian citizen. On the one hand, he showed the hollowness of the relativism of the Sophists, and, on the other hand, he pointed out that the ideas that his fellow Athenians prided themselves on were baseless and couldn't stand the test of rational explanation. But in both cases Socrates' contribution is a negative one. He doesn't at the end present some positive view of his own, either to the Sophists or to his fellow citizens. He simply leaves the matter without resolution. At the end, there's negation or aporia, but no solution. Kierkegaard says that we need to hold fast to this picture of Socrates and resist the urge of historians or philosophers to incorporate him into a larger narrative about the development of the history or philosophy in a positive way. Hegel has mistakenly attributed to Socrates a positive role as looking forward to and anticipating later developments. But the truth of the matter is that Socrates was not forward-looking but rather backward-looking. Socrates was responding to individuals and institutions that already existed and criticizing them. But this is where it stopped. He was making a negative statement about Greek culture and thought at the time. But he never managed to find the truth or to present something positive for later ages to build upon. Socrates claims to be seeking the good, that is, the concept of the good. He's constantly asking people for a definition of this, and he's given answers that reflect Athenian values and views. One by one he undermines all of these and shows how none of the definitions seems to be consistent. While both Kierkegaard and Hegel agree on this, Kierkegaard's point is that the focus should be on the eternal search for the good and not arriving at it. Kierkegaard thus focuses on Socrates' irony as a defining feature since this irony is purely negative. It tears down in the sense that it's critical of specific theses, doctrines, definitions, etc. But it doesn't build up. There's no positive element in it. Kierkegaard's account of the Romantics and modern irony sounds like an interesting chapter in the history of ideas, but, is this really meaningful in any way for our modern world today? Do we really care about what Kierkegaard had to say about long forgotten German authors like Tieck and Solger? Let's think for a moment about who we are and our role in the modern life. All of you many online students come from different parts of the world with different customs and values. Each and every one of you has an idea or a conception of yourself. Take a moment and reflect on what that is. When you look at yourself in the mirror and ask, who am I?, what kind of an answer do you give yourself? Our problem in the modern world is that as soon as we try to articulate who we are, we immediately run into the problem that there are many other people who share exactly the same characteristics that we do. When I say, for example, that I'm a person who enjoys reading about philosophy or a person who's interested in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, then I've not really said anything that could define anything I am as an individual since there are many other people in the world, probably most all of you thousands of online students, who share exactly these same properties. It then becomes a more urgent question to determine what it is that makes me uniquely who I am. We often identify ourselves by our clothes, our styles and possessions. But take a moment consider this, when I look at myself, I see that I am wearing this shirt, these pants, these shoes. But none of these things is uniquely mine. All of these are mass produced, and if I were to go onto the street it probably wouldn't take me too long to find people wearing exactly the same shirt, exactly the same pants, exactly the same shoes. In the old days before mass production, articles like this were made by craftsmen. Each one of these articles was unique, and individuals who possessed them had literally something that was one of a kind. By contrast, since the industrial revolution, virtually everything is made in mass quantities by machines. The world today is made, as it were, by cookie cutter machines, that produce everything around us, in preset forms. The danger is that each of us has become just one more product of this machine. Think of Andy Warhol's famous picture of the Campbell's tomato soup cans lined up one on top of another. This is an image of modernity. The fear of many of us is that we might become like one of these soup cans. Some people have an urge, deep within to revolt against this and to assert their individuality in the face of this kind of conformity. Think of all the ways people try to be different from everyone and express something unique about themselves. Some people dye their hair an odd or striking color or get a tattoo or pierce some unusual part of their body. But these gestures, while at first radical, also seem to fall short since, in a very short time, they are also copied by others, and soon a trend starts, and the result is again the same. So many people are doing the same thing that nothing unique or individual is really being expressed. This is our problem in the 21st century, and one can see that the Romantics back in Kierkegaard's time already saw it coming more than two centuries ago. They struggled to assert the value of the individual against the forces of conformity. But they couldn't have imagined the challenges that would come. It is these challenges that we face today. We feel quite convinced that there is something special and unique that makes us who we are. But what is this, and how can we express it? When we fail to answer these questions, we feel disoriented and lost in the world. We feel lost since we can take no consolation in the community or social groups since they undermine our individuality and make us into faceless members of a larger whole. This is the modern problem where each individual is left to him- or herself. So again ask yourself, who are you really? Of 7 billion human beings on the planet, what makes you that unique person you are? [MUSIC]
