Ep. 329: Kierkegaard on Irony (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 329 is what is irony? And we read big chunks of Soren Kierkegaard's master's thesis on the concept of irony from 1841. For more information about this book and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, permitting the established to remain, but with no validity. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas. Beginning with the presupposition that I know nothing at all, which in turn leads to the presupposition that human beings know nothing at all.

0:43 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey learning how to actualize actuality in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:49 Mark: The full title of this book, the Concept of Irony with continual reference to Socrates. And the whole first half of the book is about Socrates. So originally we don't need to read secondary literature. Let's just jump to the second half where he actually says what irony is. But the second half, though he does, you know, say some things directly about irony, is also a bunch of secondary literature. He's talking about the Romantics, including Schlegel, that we have read recently, but not Lucinde, you know, Schlegel's famous novel that we did not read, and some other folks that we didn't even know who they are.

So we were sort of just picking and choosing. So it's big chunks of part two. But then thanks to Seth accidentally reading part one, we just all read some of that as well. And what he had to say about Socrates was pretty cool because it's sort of. There are lots of uses of irony. He wants to talk about the historical progression of irony. He's very much reacting in the wake of Hegel here and Hegel's philosophy of history and history of philosophy. And so talking about not just here's just the definition of irony, it's here's how irony has been used.

And he thinks Socrates is a overall pretty good way of using it. And the Romantics, his contemporaries, he thinks, have a bad way of using it, that he, like Nietzsche, complains about the Romantics a lot. And now we have the background at least to try to guess why. I don't know. What'd you guys think of this book here?

2:06 Dylan: It was nice to see that a thesis would be constantly filled with references to other things rather than being Some things never change, I guess. So I started with the second part and as you guys know, in Slack, I found it a little annoying. And so I was glad of Seth stumbling upon the daemon of Socrates and actualization of the view and helped me understand how he was talking about irony to hear him describing Socrates as ironic. So that was super helpful and interesting. Overall, I find Kierkegaard's. The sections in which he's not primarily explicating or talking about other people, the most interesting parts. But that's probably because I haven't read those people nearly as much, just like you said, Mark, so I don't have any frame to judge them.

2:57 Mark: Yes, other Romantic. Romantic playwrights of the time.

3:01 Seth: Yeah, yeah. Stylistically, he can be a bit much to take over 150, 200 pages. But his discussion is well grounded in examples, historical examples, even of the folks that we didn't recognize as romantic poets and whatever. He still was talking. He talked a lot about Hegel, Fichte, Kant, Schlegel. He talks very specifically about what he takes to be their views of irony and where they're successful or deficient. So it's not an abstract conversation in any sense. And if you take the thesis seriously that he presents in the chapter on Socrates and his demon daimon, then it's really interesting, essentially that irony was necessary for subjectivity to actually happen, which is an interesting thesis.

But it also then begs the question of, like. Shannon asked me, she's like, what's the topic? And I said, oh, the concept of irony. And I said, I'm not even sure I could define irony. She looks it up on Google, we're driving to pick up the kid, and it's like, well, you know, irony is where you say something, but it's the. You have mean the complete opposite of what you say. And I was like, that doesn't sound right. You know, and they're giving all these examples of what could be sarcasm or, you know, all the things that we're. And then she found an article, and it was like talking about dramatic or tragic irony, Socratic irony, comedic irony.

There's actually different types of irony. And what is generally referred to as Socratic irony is the whole I teach, but I know nothing. Which, of course, as we know, Socrates never claimed to be a teacher or whatever, but that's what the perception is. And Kierkegaard gives a way more nuanced, way more interesting version of it.

4:42 Mark: Yeah, the beginning section that we didn't read quite long. The view made possible is sort of discussing various presentations of Socrates and ironies. Whenever there's any disconnect so, yeah, that could mean I'm saying something, but I really mean the opposite of what I'm saying. I mean, that is a form of irony. He doesn't think that's the most interesting kind. That's not pure irony, but it does involve some difference between the phenomena and the essence, as he puts it, you know, if we want to put it metaphysically. So just the way that, you know, he contrasts Plato's presentation of Socrates, which is idealizing him, and he sort of takes Kierkegaard, has an interpretation that I think we've shared to some extent, you know, that if Plato is saying something very positive, you know, the Timaeus, he's laying out a whole cosmology.

That's probably not Socrates. He's having Socrates talk, but that's probably not anything that Socrates actually said. That what Socrates actually said was just the negative stuff, was just, you think you have a concept of justice, Think you have a concept of piety. Let's explore it. Oh, no, it does. Looks like it doesn't work. Let's go home. You know that he takes him to be doing something purely negative in that way. But yet Plato, you know, there's this disconnect between the Platonic, idealizing version of Socrates and probably what Socrates was, as opposed to Xenophon, who I've never actually read.

You've. Dylan, you had to read him for St. John's no, he's not.

6:05 Dylan: He's not on the list. And people would do preceptorials on Xenophon, and there were people who are avid readers. But I've never read Xenophon.

6:14 Mark: According to Kierkegaard, Xenophon presents Socrates as fundamentally harmless, like it was such an injustice. All he was trying to do was help people, and they just went and they blasted him down. And Kierkegaard actually argues in some of this that people of the Athens were justified in being threatened by Socrates because what he was doing was undermining the social order that he was. If you take seriously what Seth just said, that he introduced subjectivity to the culture, he introduced inwardness to the culture. Right. He made future Christianity and worrying about conscience, he made all that possible. That seems crazily hyperbolic, like Kierkegaard is being a little ironic himself.

6:52 Seth: Well, there's a way to state Kierkegaard's case. And by the way, in the text, although he mentions Socrates in various texts, he keeps coming back to the apology. He says it's no more clear than in the whole sequence around his death. But One of the charges was that he denied or ignored the gods of the state and had his own God right or was impious in that respect. So it was like impiety and corrupting the youth were the two charges against him. Kierkegaard's point of view is he spends a lot of time examining Socrates and how Socrates follows his daimon, or demon.

And, you know, is it a God? Is it not a God? Is it an. Is it an oracle? But the point is, is that if you look at examples from specific dialogues where Socrates examines notions of justice or piety or the good or what have you, or if you just look at the way in which the daimon functions, Socrates is taking guidance from that and not following the edicts of or the rules of the state, the state being simultaneously a religious as well as a political and social order. So when he asks somebody, what is piety? The definition that he gets is the kind of definition you would expect from somebody who's within the structure of the Greek state, like it's making all the right sacrifices at the right time or, you know, whatever the case may be.

And that has absolute validity as a definition of piety for the citizens of the Greek state. And the fact that Socrates challenges it, not on any authority other than he just basically doesn't get it, doesn't believe it. He's got a voice in his head that's telling him that it's not true. Right. Is a threat to the order. It is a very severe threat to the order because he's essentially saying the rules that we follow that keep our society intact. I, and presumably I alone, am at leisure to question them. And to do so, I will not take part in the roles traditionally assigned to citizens of the state.

And he very much was a threat to the social and political order.

8:59 Dylan: It's a distinct kind of threat in that he's not waging war against it by presenting an alternative view. So he's not presenting a different set of gods. Right. He's on the one hand, sowing doubt. So there's this kind of, you know, that's a seed of corruption. And one of the ways in which you see that this subtlety, which is what Kierkegaard characterizes his negative stance, that is the characterization of his irony is he also steadfastly maintains a dedication to Athens as an. As a state and institution, or Athens as a city, I should say, maybe not state and institution is incorrect, but as a city, so he's a citizen.

He famously refuses to leave, not to poke thumb in the eye of anybody. But to say, this is where he belongs. And so that sort of dedication while also being the gadfly. Now, that's one adjective that came to mind that you hear him described as sometimes it turns up in the translation of Socrates by the people who are irritated with him, as they call him a gadfly. And that seems to be in his irritatingness, maybe not in his negativeness.

10:18 Mark: It was a polemical relation to the state religion to substitute a silence in which a warning voice was audible only on occasion, a voice that never had a thing to do with the substantial interests of political life, never said a word about them. This was part of it. That ethics is supposed to be tied. You know, the gods are tied to the state, they give you the laws. And if it so happens, he seems to actually ignore. I didn't see any reference to what you just referred to in Crito. We just have to kind of. We know that about him. But the way that Kierkegaard presents it is he just did not care about the state.

He did not care about families. He only cared about what this little voice was telling him, the truth in itself, something like that which he thought was not being satisfied by these things. And the fact that he had the source of authority in sort of a private religious sphere and not in the public sphere, even if sometimes what it told him to do was in accord with the state, he didn't do it for reasons having to do with the state.

11:14 Dylan: In the apology, he's steadfast in saying that he follows his daemon. And that even comes up in the Symposium. Your point pointing out about Kierkegaard not engaging the Crito, the Socrates of the Crito, just makes me wonder about Kierkegaard's interpretation of the distinction between Plato and Socrates to be had makes me think he would say something like, well, there's a Platonic Socrates, an argument that Plato is making to kind of defend Socrates that's going on here as well, that is distinct from, you know, the actual Socrates of essence, the essential Socrates.

And so that is in Plato's interest and that Plato wants to defend him as a citizen and partisan of Athens, even if it's not the Athens that is instantiated by the state mechanisms. And that maybe Kierkegaard's perspective, that would be Plato, not Socrates, making that defense. This is the section that sort of begins to articulate this to the one that Seth pointed us to. Section 2 of Book 1, Actualization of the daemon of Socrates is going through and really characterizing this Negative relation to everything, to me is worth articulating more about how that is inherent subjectivity and that's an introducing subjectivity to Greece and how that subjectivity is distinct.

How that is subjectivity is distinct from someone, I don't know, like Achilles or any other character. Powerful individuals who are acting and leading on their own accord and seeing the world from their own point of view and sort of focusing the world through their point of view. How are they not being subjective and presenting subjectivity to the Greek psyche, But Socrates, in his you know, negative way of chipping away at people's understandings and presenting doubt about how is that intrinsically more subjective and more presenting subjectivity than the arguably sort of positive Persona of Achilles, for instance, just as an example,

13:27 Seth: this is where I think reference to what you made in your little intro, Dylan, the concept of actuality is important. Ultimately, what Kierkegaard is saying is that Socratic irony is essentially, it gives Socrates license to, I don't know what the right term here is, ignore or depart from actuality in favor of something eternal or something transcendent.

13:59 Dylan: Let's pause right there for a second. Right. Because this is helping, I think, with understanding what Socratic irony is by having the poles of irony. I think if we're going to sort this out, the thing about irony to me is there's a two ness to it, right? So when you have that preliminary definition or that dictionary definition, it's when you say something that's the opposite of what you mean. So there's a two ness there. You have the thing that you said and the thing that you meant to say. Now here with Socrates, what you're talking about is it's a relationship to something that's like the true, the eternal. So that's where you're anchored. And so there's a saying something that is one thing that you've said, but it has a relationship that is distinct from the truth, maybe not the opposite of it.

14:50 Seth: It's a good point for clarification. It's probably not fair to say that Socrates was pointed towards something like the eternal, and that's probably Plato. But what it is fair to say is that irony for Socrates means he has the freedom to detach his judgment from, call them the facts on the ground or the reality of lived life. So when he questions somebody on whatever topic and they give an answer which I'm sure, like again, would be very standard and accepted in the society, and then he finds a way to counter it, the examples that are continually forthcoming are still rooted in some semblance of practice or lived life and so forth.

And Socrates, irony is a distancing. Kierkegaard's very clear about saying that irony isn't just like saying the opposite of what you mean or something like that. It's a distance from meaning. It's a distance from the actual world that knows that it has that distance, but also knows that it can't produce some things. It's not going to re anchor itself in the world.

16:00 Dylan: When we think about something ironic, there's this question of is it the opposite? Am I being opposite speaking? Or is it more that I'm trying something out? And that trying something out that's the way you're describing it is that there's this anchor that maybe he can't even articulate. Maybe in fact, that's what it means to say I don't know anything. The only thing I know is I don't know anything. So he doesn't have a positive teaching, but he has a way of unearthing and calling away the things that it's not. And so that's the negativity part. That's. It took me a while to understand that's what Kierkegaard meant by negative, that Socrates is pure negativity. It's because he's purely calling away, right?

16:45 Mark: If you just say the opposite of what you mean, and everybody knows, if you speak with a sarcastic tone of voice, you're actually just communicating something straightforward in a goofy way. There's no ambiguity in what you mean. That the distance, not necessarily what you said is trying out, is that you're setting what you actually believe as the speaker at some distance from the literal meaning of what is said. And that gives you a freedom. Whereas you would be tied down by either just stating, here's what I believe, or by stating sarcastically, oh, yeah, that's what I believe.

Like, either way, you're sort of committed. And so that's a good thing about irony and a bad thing about irony. Because, you know, as we're going to see later, it's possible to be too free, right? To not mean anything, to just have a completely meaningless life because you're never really committed to anything. Whereas Socrates is supposedly doing it the right way. And I think Seth was wondering about if he was just saying, I'm going to, you know, say something negative about the present. Material things are in front of me. Justice is giving back what is owed to you.

One of these kind of things, piety is doing sacrifice, you know, is what society tells you Doing sacrifices at the right time, if that was all there was to it. And he meant to say, no, actually, here's my new religion that you should follow instead of these traditional things that would not be ironic, it's that he's pointing at something sort of beyond which one can speak or beyond which one can know. Kierkegaard brings a prophecy at one point, you know, a prophet that might. Something bad's gonna happen. I don't know exactly what. So that, you know, what makes Socratic irony okay is not that he is rejecting everything.

He's rejecting what is right in front of him. This material time and place. Something is wrong with Athens. I don't know exactly how to fix it, but I'm pointing at a solution elsewhere beyond in the future.

18:39 Seth: There's a way to read this that say that Socrates is like John the Baptist, right? He came early, paved the way for Plato, where Plato presents the positive vers that was uncovered by the Socratic questioning of the real form. That's good. And so on and so forth. I'm not sure that that's entirely true, but it's really important to Kierkegaard that there is nothing positive in the Socratic method and what he does. There's no system building, there's no edifice, there's no presentation of concepts or authoritative points of view. It's strictly negative.

And he actually spent some time talking about the idea that all I know is that I know nothing, which is, I think, what he got from the oracle, how that ultimately is just a form of negativity. But what's important for Kierkegaard is that two things. One is the negativity was essentially required for Socrates to act in a way that would give birth to an idea that we are embodied egos, basically Socratic irony and the negativity that was. Separated him from the other Greeks was required for the development of a modern notion of consciousness. So without Socrates doing what he's doing, there are no actors that have a notion.

There's no model for Plato to build the idea of the contemplative philosopher king or anything like that. And then the other part for Kierkegaard is, and this is what I'll be interested to see about later is like. And the way in which he did it, this negative dialectic that he engaged in was ironic. And it's unclear to me whether those two things are necessarily intertwined or whether he could have been negatively dialectical without being ironic in that sense. But the idea that subjectivity, the birth of subjectivity Requires irony is a really interesting thesis.

20:36 Dylan: The way you're talking about it makes a lot of sense, but it also articulates what I found frequently confusing by calling it Socratic irony and trying to understand what is ironic about it, in part because of this it not being opposite, it just being distinct from. So what Socrates is speaking about and the way in which he behaves is it only ends up being opposite if you cast everything as zeros and ones. And so one would be the truth and the eternal, and everything else is zero and any other statement is zero. And so maybe that's a way in which it's opposite, but it doesn't seem to me that he even thinks of it that way.

So it may be that he, in his ironic stance, he knows that he's not speaking, except in some very limited sense, the truth. But it's not the same thing as saying that it's opposite the truth, in part because if it was literally the opposite, to Mark's point earlier, you would know what the truth was, and so it would be fully defined in that way. But then if I start admitting that, well, speaking ironically means just, only means speaking knowingly, adjacently, right? Then all kinds of things are ironic. Like the entire activity of science is ironic.

I mean, literally, it is, right? The activity of making a model of the world that's aimed at trying to be true about the world, but knowing that it's not an actual model of the world is exactly that activity. And so that might be fine. I mean, that might be totally fine, but it's not. What I have conventionally thought about is ironic.

22:14 Seth: This is where the first thing, after doing some reading, I was like, what's the definition of irony? It's confusing. I'll make an attempt to characterize at least what I think Kierkegaard is saying about Socrates and what irony means, kind of in a very plain way. So Socrates position is ironic because he's distanced himself from the standard social order, what have you. He's talking about it, making reference to it. He's not concerned with presenting an alternative to the existing system. He's just trying to kind of like lob bombs, right? He's trying to get people to question their own beliefs.

That's really what he does, right? As he says. And this gets why he was corrupting, you know, especially the youth. They're very corruptible because they listen to him. So the ironic aspect of it is the fact that he acknowledges the existence of the social order and the real, if you will. But he wants to Essentially cut at it or make jokes about it or whatever, only for the purpose of potentially sowing seeds of dissent. And so there's kind of like irony in some sense, has a distance in care. Now, this is Kierkegaard saying, right? Like, because Socrates would say, I was doing what was best for the state, and so on and so forth.

But Kierkegaard, I think, is saying, no, he was doing great harm to the state, and he knew he was doing great harm to the state. In the same way that, like, somebody ironically makes a joke about something, like Mark said, you know, they're not committing to something. They're trying to make fun of the real without actually standing in any particular place with respect to it. It's just simply play. That's really the ironic dimension. And I think that's what Kierkegaard was saying about Socrates. Had he been positive, his position might not have been ironic.

24:10 Mark: Well, in the specific statement, I know nothing, on Kierkegaard's interpretation, he actually was not being ironic with that. He meant it because what he meant is, I don't know anything that's important, right? I don't have real knowledge. He's setting up some standard that he doesn't know what the standard is, but he knows it's not being met.

24:30 Dylan: When he says, the only thing I know is that I know nothing, that's not ironic.

24:34 Seth: But Kierkegaard's point is it doesn't present anything positive. It's not ironic. It's sincere, but it doesn't do anything.

24:40 Dylan: Well, it does set up the rest of his activity as ironic in the positive sense that Mark. Well, in the unobjectionable sense, I want to avoid calling it positive because it's fundamentally negative, Right, in the unobjectionable sense that Mark was referring to, because it is part of anchoring his quest for something having to do with the eternal or the true, as opposed to something that would be fundamentally sophistical and not anchored to anything, which would be a kind of deep relativism that he would object to, the Kierkegaard and Socrates would object to.

So that earnest statement that the only thing I know is that I know nothing is one manifestation of the anchor point for his questioning and the questioning that even though he's making these positive statements, you know, like in a kind of tree, well, if we take this to be the case, then doesn't this follow? And if we take that to be the case, doesn't then this follow, which has all the appearances of being something that he's secretly has a positive claim underlying it. But Kierkegaard would say that he doesn't have a positive claim on it. What's ironic is that the manifestation of the irony is he puts forth a hypothesis.

Suppose that justice is the will of the stronger. Let's follow that thread. Right. But when he presents that he doesn't believe that justice is the will is stronger. It's not that he believes something different than. He just knows that that's not it. I should be careful. And maybe he does know that that's not it.

26:16 Seth: Let's separate the knowledge that he knows nothing, which we can talk about as, let's say, the motivation for his project or for. And then how he chose to go about it. Right. So he could very well have gone and studied with. And maybe he did spend some time studying with sophists or with various other teachers. He could have written works and had critiques and he could have engaged in. There's a distinction between the knowledge that he knows nothing and then this voice in his head that tells him what to do and what not to do. Or Kierkegaard thinks just only what not to do. So, you know, he makes a conscious choice to pursue knowledge in the way that he does, which is not necessarily the only way that you could have chosen to do it.

27:00 Dylan: Yeah. On 164, in the first section, Kierkegaard anchors it to his daemon. He says the daemon is the unconscious. The external that decides yet is also something subjective. The daimon is not Socrates himself, nor his opinion, nor his conviction, but is something unconscious. Socrates is impelled. This is internal force, and that by being the internal force is the source of subjectivity. And then on 169, in the section about the two the condemnation of Socrates and the two charges against him. This one is in the section about not accepting the gods of the state and introducing new gods.

Kierkegaard talks about his ignorance and points out that ignorance is a true philosophical position and at the same time also completely negative. In other words, Socrates ignorance was by no means an empirical ignorance. On the contrary, he was a very well informed person, was well read, and the poets and philosophers had much experience in life and consequently was not ignorant in the empirical sense. In the philosophic sense, however, he was ignorant. He was ignorant of the ground of all being, the eternal, the divine. That is, he knew that it was, but he did not know what it was.

He was conscious of it, and yet he was not conscious of it, inasmuch as the only thing he could say about it was that he did not know anything about it. But this says, in other words, the same thing we previously designated as philosopher had the idea as boundary. So that last part is the way in which Kierkegaard is going to have Socrates have irony in the acceptable position.

28:45 Mark: Yeah, bounded.

28:47 Dylan: Yep.

28:47 Mark: I found a quote. So this is actually earlier than the chapter two of part one that we. But it's page 131. Irony is simultaneously a new position, as such is absolutely polemical toward Greek culture. It is a position that continually cancels itself, is a nothing that devours everything, and a something one can never grab hold of, something that is and is not at the same time, but something that at rock bottom is comic. I just thought that was a much more extreme description than the one you just gave. You know, a position that continually cancels itself. If you just consider in the abstract what Socrates is doing. I'm going to go around. I feel like I have a higher calling and I'm going to go around and just debunk people. There's no reason. I mean, you could call that just because it's purely negative, an ironic enterprise, but it's not a position that continually cancels itself.

29:38 Dylan: This is now opening up why you'd have the adjectival construction, Socratic irony. Because this, I think here Kierkegaard is referring to irony in general, which would open up to the case of romantic irony versus Socratic irony. And this is presenting the problem of romantic irony as being unbounded.

29:59 Mark: Yeah. You could picture a follower of Socrates not having the same moral roots, Something like that. You know, the same notion of the divine, of the transcendental, who still likes to go around and show everybody else

30:13 Dylan: is stupid or delights in their power. Right. Wouldn't the standpoint of someone, whether it be Alcibiades or, you know, someone who followed Thrasymachus in believing that power is. The will is stronger. You'd be the most extreme form of politician. Right. It's only jockeying for position in any given immediate sense, and there's no bound to that.

30:35 Mark: Yeah. You think that the Sophists would be a great example of irony because like lawyers, they could just take up whatever position they're obviously by this definition using irony in that. Okay. I'm just hypothetically taking up this position. Let's see what the best argument we can give for it. On Kierkegaard's account, they give too much. Right. They end up arguing for every. I could give you a positive argument for every side as opposed to Socrates, who's giving you no positive argument for any side, but consequently he finds that what they've served up is meaningless.

Like you know, because of the deep irony that this is not truth that's being presented to you. It's not that, oh, all truth is relative and so you could have this truth and this opposite truth and they're both true like that, that is a position that devours itself, as he's saying here. I mean, I'm still curious, like I don't think in that section where he talks about the Sophists, maybe that was between the part. It's in the third part of third chapter of part one. Whether he calls it ironic or he doesn't want to deign to call it irony because it is so lacking in the thing that made Socrates good, it does not have authentic inwardness.

Right. That is essential. You know, if you just talk randomly, well then the thought that's in your mind is not going to match the literal meaning of what you're saying because you don't really have any thought in your mind. But that is not, does not have the inwardness, it does not have the self reflectiveness. Yeah, this was your question before, Dylan. Isn't the fact that somebody has a distinct point of view, doesn't that make them subjective? Well, no, no. Subjective is self reflectiveness, that it's being aware of this distinction between what you mean and what you say.

Whereas if, you know, you could program your computer to sputter things randomly, the computer literally means nothing at all. But yet the words that is spitting out mean something that does not show that it is being ironic. It does not have the self reflective capability. I think you would have to say the same for the, the Sophists are just being sort of like machines that like, oh, you need an argument for this, like ask ChatGPT for an argument for this. The sophists are basically being just like ChatGPT and there's no inner life necessary for doing that at all.

32:49 Dylan: And here inner life is reflecting again this kind of boundary. Right. It's manifesting a boundary because you're anchoring it.

32:57 Seth: Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key point. The question is whether you could be a sophist and be bounded by an idea in the same way that Socrates is. And the answer is, you know, no, you can be a sophist and you can be completely bounded by the laws that govern the state, then you haven't achieved the requisite distance from actuality to

33:15 Mark: be able to the profit motive. I'm Bounded by the profit motive.

33:19 Dylan: That's more like my Achilles example. And I think the sophisticated example or another, which you're dedicated to. I think Mark's right. That's not ironic. It's not ironic. And it doesn't bring forth the subjectivity involved in irony just to have a distinct point of view because it's not reflecting that inner life where you have that two ness even inside the way in which you're thinking and acting.

33:46 Mark: It still has to be hyperbole, ironic hyperbole to say that Socrates invented subjectivity, like the fact that lying existed. Right? There's a 2 Ness there. I mean, something. But I'm going to tell you the opposite because I want to get your money.

34:02 Dylan: Like, okay, but that's not ironic, right? Even in, you know, I thought you were really on the money when you pointed out that when you say exactly the opposite or you, you lie, then you're not being ironic.

34:15 Mark: Well, what about bullshit then? From as what we said before, like, so I'm still trying to get your money, but I might say true things, I might say false things, just using Frankfurt's, you know. So that sounds like it totally is

34:26 Dylan: irony in the bad sense. In that romantic, untethered sense, there's a kind of detachment.

34:33 Seth: And Kierkegaard says a lot about this later on in other books. Subjectivity is the relation of the self to itself, the self coming back to the self, and the mystery of that weirdness, et cetera, mediated by God. It's the internal whatever. So irony is really you're doing or saying a thing not because of the outcome that will be achieved, so much as you're doing it for your own amusement. So if you're trying to intentionally deceive someone, you have a goal in mind, and if you achieve that goal, you have success. And if you don't, you don't. But like, if I put on a hat that says gas, grass or ass, no one rides for free, and I wear it to a patio restaurant here in Austin, I'm doing it because it amuses me to put that hat on, right?

Not because I'm expecting somebody to literally take that for true, or to be like, do you really believe that? Or to be like, oh, that's so retro, it's cool. Although that is what happens around in Austin. And that's, in a certain sense, style is the epitome of ironic action in some sense. But anyway, I think that's a critical part of it, is not doing the thing strictly for your own benefit or outcome or amusement. That's why there's a strong negativity associated with this. It's not simply, you're not system building or proposing an alternative political construct or whatever.

It's that you're not even trying. You're just trying to amuse yourself or entertain yourself.

36:11 Mark: He says specifically somewhere that the reason for it is in the act itself. It is not for some external purpose which does make you think like Socrates thinks he's trying to help people. That's why he's doing it.

36:23 Seth: Socrates says he's trying to help people and help the state. And if you read more of that section on Xenophon, I think he sets himself up against Xenophon as giving like a much less charitable reading of what Socrates was up to. Yes, I agree with you that from everything we've learned in all the Socratic, you know, he's saying that he's trying to do something positive, if you will.

36:45 Dylan: The way you just described it. Seth, makes me think of something we've mentioned before in the context of Nietzsche and Heidegger. I guess maybe others is free play in that ironic stance is you're engaging and this is where freedom comes out of irony and out of subjectivity is you're acting in this sort of mode of free play. But I think we're maybe struggling a little bit about the distinction between the irony rightly engaged in and irony corruptly engaged in, which would be like sort of the two categories that Kierkegaard would have, like sort of Socratic irony and romantic irony. And what the difference is, and it would be the character of bounded free play, something like that, and unbounded free play.

37:35 Mark: I like that Seth brought in our previous Kierkegaard episode in the definition of self consciousness, because it is a relation to yourself mediated by God. We discussed that just after doing Hegel on self consciousness. Most of these folks that have an idea of self consciousness don't think. You just start self conscious. It has to be mediated by a third party in some way. And the natural way to think of that is it's other people, they treat you certain ways. And so you start to actually see yourself through their eyes. And, you know, we can even get to Fanon that you could see yourself in a horrible way through their eyes.

But to think that no, it's not a real person, that's necessary. It's an idealized vision. So God, who you don't, you know, have a mystical experience and see through his eyes because all the cosmos is one or whatever, you know, that's in fact the kind of romantic nonsense that Kierkegaard is against, how we actually know God, I think is something certainly we don't get it out of here. But it appears as a boundedness, right? It appears as a limit and so controls the way in which we. The limits by which we see ourselves. And I think part of the way that has to show up is just actuality, facticity we established.

The ironist is always saying no to something, but are they saying no to everything? You know, that the romantic ideal, this we'll get into in part two of this discussion is starting with Fichte, who is sort of the grandfather of Romanticism. You know, how do we get the whole phenomenal world? Well, we, the individual I creates it. And the Romantics took off from that in a way that Fichte didn't like to say. We can kind of do it at will. We can do it however we like. I can be all that I can be. And Kierkegaard interprets this in a pretty negative way that, you know, kind of the idea for Kierkegaard is using irony, using this freedom that it allows you to become the best version of who you can be.

As opposed to there is no best version. There is no essence. You know, I was thinking of Sartre a lot here too. There is no in itself that we would try to be. In fact, if you say I'm trying to be, you know, the best ver. I'm trying to fulfill my potential, my telos or something, you are fooling yourself. That is just ignorance talking, you know. So the Romantics delight in this and just we can make the world what we want to be. We can transform ourselves in any way. And Kierkegaard's gonna see that as a very unserious way of approaching the world.

So an abuse of this wonderful thing

40:10 Dylan: called irony that seems like a great way to end part one.

40:14 Mark: A little preview you got? Yes, we'll come back. You can hear this next week unless you are a supporter through our website through Patreon. And then you can hear it immediately in your. In your feed. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support see ya.