Ep. 329: Kierkegaard on Irony (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 3, 329 part 2 discussing Soren Kierkegaard's on the Concept of Irony, 1841. We focus mostly in the first half on his view of Socrates, which I had one main point to add to that. This is from page 177 of the book. It is customary to characterize Socrates position also with the well known phrase know thyself so the question is what. What does that actually mean? The phrase know yourself means separate yourself from the other precisely because the self did not exist prior to Socrates. It was once again an oracular pronouncement corresponding to Socrates consciousness that commanded him to know himself, but it was reserved for a later age to go deeply into the self knowledge.

Yep. And then just goes on to say that this is actually very much compatible with the Socratic ignorance that he professed. Let me ask one more time. Do you feel like somehow this is ironic hyperbole on Kierkegaard's part? You could have talked before Socrates about, you know, what makes you unique. Can you try to emphasize that? Like you know, what kind of person. What do you. Do you want to be a shepherd or do you want to be a politician? Like, certainly there must be some sense. It's not like he introduced the whole social mobility and self knowledge of any.

That just seems very bizarre to claim

1:27 Dylan: that it doesn't even make sense. Like thinking about the Republic and the discussion of the division of labor and how a just state would be set up. Right. So obviously the fact that people do different things and have different roles exists, but that also must not be the way in which we understand the origin of subjectivity, at least according to Kierkegaard. There must be something about that that's not subjective, which I think was what sort of Seth was pointing out.

1:54 Mark: If society just assigned your role, that wouldn't involve any subjectivity. But if there's a let's go to the guidance counselor, which is what Socrates essentially suggests in the, in the Republic, that yeah, just because you're the son of a warrior doesn't mean you should be a warrior. You got to somehow, whether it's you yourself, somehow somebody has to evaluate.

2:12 Dylan: Yeah, but you also still have in the Republic the whole metallic souls. Right. So it may be that you're. I mean, maybe this is Plato or whatever, but I guess the distinction we're talking about here is your distinction and you having a different disagreement, even with the way in which other people understand you. And you have your own unique look at the world. I guess we're saying it feels like. Well, that seems awful subjective. And how is that not? It seems to be in tension with the notion that irony is the birthplace of subjectivity, as Kierkegaard claims. And I thought we were going down the road that the reason you would say that is irony includes the self understanding of one's subjectivity.

2:57 Seth: I don't think that irony gives you full subjectivity in the sense of the self being aware of itself. I think what Socratic irony at least gives is something eternal like the idea that then becomes the thing through which you can mediate subjective experience. I don't think Kierkegaard would claim that Socrates, you know, had full Hegelian self consciousness and self awareness. In fact, just in the same way that he later on is going to talk about the development of self consciousness through this mediation of the third term you can think of. You know, this is a genealogy.

Like Socrates takes the first step in that direction by mediating his own subjective experience through something other than the real and the actual. And in that sense he creates the space for the ironic detachment, but also the beginnings of a form of subjectivity which rapidly get developed following Socrates. Right, But I don't know that Kierkegaard would agree that irony equals, at least in, in Socrates, irony equals full self awareness of subjectivity.

4:13 Dylan: Sure.

4:13 Mark: You know, Kierkegaard is certainly not unique in this. I could be. I don't remember if Nietzsche read Kierkegaard or what, what exactly was the relationship between them. But Nietzsche says stuff about Christianity with its self consciousness, you know, the agonizing about your conscience, what did I do? And guilt. This made people interesting. And he also characterizes Socrates as being the forerunner of that, that he essentially broke being. Everybody was just being. All those Greeks, they were just so happy with themselves. And Socrates had come and turned them inward and say, look, look at yourself.

Are you sure that virtue that you think you're sporting so proudly really is a virtue at all? And that just gave rise to a whole bunch of self conscious in the, what we might call a negative sense. Like, wait, am I really doing this right? I was confident, but now I'm not, you know, I'm too self conscious to be confident. That doesn't necessarily open up the entire realm of, you know, a developed self consciousness that Kierkegaard's going to be, you know, again following Hegel, very open to this kind of stuff, changes over time. You know, the man of today, you know, what they consider self consciousness is going to be very different.

You know, we always impose that fact. We assume that people were just pretty much like we are now all the way back through history. And all these guys want to argue like, no, no, actually read what they wrote, read how they talk about themselves. Like, you're not going to find an Augustine who's just moaning about himself and his sinfulness and reflecting on. You're just not going to find that in pre Socratic Times in any writings that you find one phrase that we did not bring up last time if we want. What is an actual definition that he gives a couple of times.

I found irony is infinite absolute subjectivity. I found that a few times. So it's infinite because it does not negate just this or that phenomenon. It negates all phenomena. It is absolute because that by virtue. This is page 261. That by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not so Socrates's irony, at least. And if we want to take this as a general definition of irony, it's subjective, it's infinite, and it's unbounded. It applies to all things. I think about. It is a better word than infinite. And it is absolute because it is referring implicitly to the absolute.

I'm not sure if that makes sense, because we were just characterizing. Referring to the absolute would be a limit. It's referring to the. Using the idea as a limit. That sounds like it's bounded. So it's bounded in one sense, but it's unbounded in another sense in that it is at least reflects on all being, all earthly things. I don't know. Like, in other words, the absolute does not count as a being.

7:02 Dylan: Did you say irony is infinite absolute subjectivity or infinite absolute negativity? Because that's what I underlined on page 261.

7:11 Mark: He says it in the same sentence. He says it's that this amounts to negativity.

7:16 Dylan: Yes, the beginning of the first paragraph is. It is negativity only because it negates. It is infinite because it does not negate. This or that phenomenon is absolute because it is by. By virtue of that which it negates is a higher something that still is not.

7:31 Mark: Yeah, I might have put subjectivity in my notes because that's how I understood it. That is not part of the definition. Yeah, no, I have in quotes from the Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Absolute, infinite negativity. I mean, do we understand. Because he talks in different parts about like, what this infinity amounts to. Like, I mean, I just said it just means it applies to everything. But he refers later to like, well, there's an inner infinity, and that's the good kind. And then there's an outer infinity, and that is a bad kind. Do you remember what that distinction is? Sounded like Seth, you at least remember what the inner one amounts to?

8:06 Seth: Well, no, I thought part of what he was talking about was the infinity is. Uses the term nothing. That essentially, when you think about Abstraction. When you think about the infinite or the eternal or what have you, because you can't say anything positive about it, and because it can be anything, it's ultimately a nothing. Whereas the infinity that's contained within our brains is not a nothing. Whether that makes sense or not, I don't know, but that's what I remember.

8:38 Mark: Because it's bounded by our true nature.

8:41 Seth: Because it's bounded, period. It's not true nature so much as there is a boundary. The infinity that is within us, it's an infinity that has constraints. And by having constraints that means it's a something and not a nothing. As opposed to. Because you can characterize it or you can productivity, creative productivity in particular is something that comes. This is the Romantic right. The individual interacting with the particular and bringing forth the eternal. Right. That's what we just went through with our Romantic aesthetics.

9:12 Mark: That's what we got out of Romanticism. That doesn't seem to be the way Kierkegaard characterizes it. The thing that he seems to laud seems to be what you just said. But yet he says, these actual Romantics that I'm reading, including Schlegel, that's not what they believe. They're much less. They're a bunch of nothingness.

9:30 Dylan: Yeah. On 267, he's characterizing Socrates and he says Socrates undertaking was not to make the abstract concrete, but to let the abstract become visible through the immediately concrete. So that sounds like what we're talking about reaching out for to God through the concrete in the world. But that's not what he thinks the Romantics are doing.

9:50 Mark: Right. The specific. The specific contrast in that context is a whole section where he's talking about Hegel's analysis of Socrates. And Hegel seems to read Socrates as much more of everything that Plato says that Socrates says in any of the dialogues, such that. Yeah, he is trying to make these abstract otherworldly things very concrete to his listeners. I mean, just think about the end of the Republic of what is justice? Well, I can't completely tell you what justice is, but I can really get you looking in the right direction. I can introduce it to you.

I can turn your head towards getting out of the cave. I can't actually take you out of the cave, but I can tell you that there is a cave. You know, there's something like a cave. I can use these poetic things to get your head twisted in the right direction. And Hegel at least describes that as making the abstract. Right, making the infinite concrete, like you were saying.

10:49 Dylan: Yep.

10:50 Mark: The abstract concrete. Yeah, because that's, that's what Hegel's all about anyway, is through time. Oh, when the first idea of something. So maybe, in fact Socrates is the idea of irony, but he's not the full realization. At least that's the way that in Hegelian fashion, Kierkegaard talks a lot, is like, we get the seeds of something and then it's. It's only abstract. So even the Romantics, they, yeah, they believe in freedom. I can do anything, but it's a very abstract freedom. It's not real freedom. It's not the freedom to do some concrete thing that you, you know, is actually important and ethical.

11:27 Dylan: Just to go back to the subjectivity question. So we had on 261 irony as an infinite absolute negativity. Then he folds in subjectivity on 262, saying, Irony is a qualification of subjectivity. In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He's free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended because there's nothing that holds him but this very freedom. The suspension gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities. And if he needs any consolation for everything that is destroyed, he can have recourse to the enormous reserve fund of possibility.

12:19 Mark: Yeah, I think you were getting at why he's using infinity. Because it's the infinite possibilities. It's not just that. It's applying to everything. A little earlier, page 252, he describes irony as a kind of inner infinity that desires to emancipate its creation from every finite relation to itself, that wants to see itself freed from the condolences of fellow sufferers and from all the congratulations of the tender, loving brotherhood of authors. So this is specifically talking about an ironic writing style, which is something that Kierkegaard is very much known for.

The things that we're going to read from either or for our next episode are written from the point of view of supposedly two different authors, or rather one author that in one case is quoting another author. And that is exactly like we were saying before is because you can explore ideas. I'm putting this out under a fake name because, again, I want to emancipate the creation from me. Right? I don't want everybody just reading this and like, oh, I know Mark and what he would say. I've heard him on the podcast a lot No, I want to. I want them to have a.

A fresh take on it. Maybe I could even write this as what if I were a screwball conservative, you know, really a real conspiracy theory. Got. And write a whole treatise for some reason, from that point of view. I wouldn't want people either judging me because of it or judging it because of what they know of me.

13:49 Dylan: What was the movie years and years ago with Tim Robbins playing the conservative folk singer? This land is my land, this land ain't your land.

14:01 Mark: Bob Roberts, was that supposed to be. I mean, obviously it was a satire, but was the character faking it? I don't remember the.

14:09 Dylan: No, no. I was thinking of Tim Robbins himself. Right. You know, Tim Robbins is famously not that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes me also think of Stephen Colbert's character before he started hosting the Late Show. The Colbert Report was famously this way. Right?

14:27 Seth: Yeah.

14:28 Mark: Yeah. Which I guess that shows that what he's saying about. You could explain why you'd want to use a pseudonym for the purposes of irony, but you certainly don't need a pseudonym. Everybody knew, in fact, they knew probably what Stephen Colbert actually thought. I don't think there were whole crowds of people. I don't know. Do you think people were watching that show as a conservative pundit, given that it was on Comedy Central, it was not on Fox News, that he did pretty obviously state things too extreme, too jokey. It was not a good enough simulation to be a purely ironic performance.

15:03 Dylan: It's an interesting question, right, Because. So it makes me want to talk a little bit more about why is it funny, but that the fact that it's funny seems to be tied to the freedom of it. And so in the case with Colbert, you'd be saying, well, we're finding it funny and everybody's partaking of the joke. But then you would have some comedian like Andy Kaufman used to go into clubs and basically play jokes on the audience that only he knew. Right. He's acting one way, and so he's being ironic, but completely, you know, he's playing. So there's a joke going on. Right. So that's part that, you know, irony is tied up with humor. Maybe it's separate from what makes it funny, but what makes it delightful, maybe, is the freedom involved.

15:50 Seth: At the risk of taking this conversation in a very different direction, when we did our Philosophy of Comedy episodes in the past, and I wrote about on the blog, when I still cared to put words to paper about, you know, Colbert and these, there's, I think, comedic irony. If there Is such a thing can be extremely dangerous. You have to be doing it for an audience that's fully in on the joke with no regard to whether anybody will enjoy it or like it. And I think there's a sense of responsibility that comes with. This is where I think there's. If you don't do it properly or if the circumstances aren't right, there's an element of dissimulation and that can be misinterpreted.

And that I believe that the people who do it have the responsibility now. They're accountable for the misinterpretation of their work. When they willfully do something ironic for comic effect, that it's taken seriously, I think there's a certain amount of responsibility. There can be. Maybe that's the right way to put it. And I felt like Colbert was a more extreme example of that. But it gets into this whole point about. I'm not really sure what irony looks like in that kind of a context, and whether it could be harmless or whether it matters who the audience is.

Right. Like, so if Kaufman. His thing is, he would come up, right? And he would play a character like the little Latvian guy with the. And people thought it would evolve into something else, but instead he just carried it. He just straight. Straight faced it for eight, 10 minutes, whatever his set was. And the audience was expecting him to do something funny, and he wasn't going to do that for them.

17:38 Dylan: So you're making me think of Borat now. Right. I mean, another example of someone who is playing a joke on the audience, but then he's filming it, so there's a separate audience that is in on the joke that he's playing on the audience that he's performing in front of while he's getting filmed, right?

17:59 Seth: Yeah. I don't have the stomach for that stuff. It's malicious to me, kind of, period.

18:04 Dylan: But it seems ironic. I mean, it's examples of ironic behavior, right?

18:09 Seth: Yeah.

18:10 Mark: The first time seeing Spinal Tap as a young person, did you know it was a joke?

18:16 Dylan: I did, yeah.

18:17 Seth: Of course.

18:19 Mark: I think I didn't know what I was watching. I'm like, this is weird. But I didn't know that it was just a bunch of actors. So in that sense.

18:29 Dylan: And you felt that way all the way through, and he got done.

18:32 Mark: I think I was just too young and I just didn't really understand what I was.

18:36 Dylan: Yeah. Watching. Well, this is the. This is the danger, you know, this is the corruption of the. The youth kind of thing, Right?

18:41 Seth: Yeah.

18:42 Mark: I mean, it didn't make me immediately go out and get an amp that could go up to turn. Turn my amp up to its highest possible volume and write an 11 on it.

18:52 Dylan: You have to want to do that anyway.

18:54 Mark: Yeah, I guess that's the thing about. Right, irony that, yes, you're playing a character, but you don't, again, necessarily mean the opposite of that. You're not saying that these characters are completely valueless and stupid. Actually, that song, as dumb as it is, kind of feels good to sing. And I want to sing a lot. So it's like it's a satire, but it is actually being the thing, you know, Especially in the fact that they were actually creating songs. It's not like they're just referring to songs. They were producing new songs that are kind of just as good as the thing they were making fun of. But you can feel superior because, like, ha, ha ha, I am merely making a joke about this kind of dumb rock, but I'm enjoying it on the level of dumb rock.

19:37 Dylan: You're making me think now about the distinction between irony like that, where I'm making a performance in which I mean to be saying something different about the thing I'm performing than any other kind of acting involved at all. Right?

19:53 Mark: Any actor has to end, any artist. I mean, he addresses this later. I mean, there has to be a certain distance between you and your creation that is not merely like, I'm just expressing myself.

20:04 Seth: That.

20:04 Mark: That would not be properly ironic.

20:06 Dylan: Well, is every kind of acting ironic fundamentally in the way that Kierkegaard is talking about it? Because there again, you're just. Why wouldn't I say? I mean, the difference with Spinal Tap in being a parody is you have a different intention in the acting than the surface level acting, right? But when, you know, you take a play, say Hamlet, right? Is Hamlet not being Hamlet, the actors playing Hamlet to be Hamlet, Right? Or I mean, in fact, you could criticize, wouldn't you, a certain kind of performance of Hamlet which was too ironic, too self conscious, breaking the fourth wall, right? You would say, well, that actor isn't actually playing Hamlet. That actor is playing somebody playing Hamlet and therefore is not authentically Hamlet and is being too ironic. And that would be the criticism of it, right?

20:58 Mark: Yes. You made a Saturday Night Live reference, Frank Zappa on Saturday Night Live, where he just like, did not feel confident enough about his acting. So he's just like, I'm going to read off the cue cards and make it obvious that I'm reading off the cue cards. I'm basically satirizing other Guests that, you know, play this game, but I am superior to this stupid game that I'm playing. And they just never let him back on the show again because it was

21:23 Dylan: so disrespectful because he's too cool for school and he's an asshole for doing that.

21:27 Mark: Right, exactly. So we're getting at ways in which irony can be used not as a way of increasing self consciousness and exploration, but as a way to lie about yourself to yourself. That you're like, oh, I'm just listening to this Taylor Swift ironically. No, you spent a lot of time listening to Taylor Swift. You like Taylor Swift. Like, you could think you're superior to

21:52 Dylan: it, and that's okay.

21:54 Mark: Yeah, you shouldn't have to think that you're doing it ironically. You shouldn't have to think that you're superior. You like that hat, Seth, that you were wearing in the ass or grass.

22:05 Seth: Yeah, of course, I was gonna make an unnecessary comment about Taylor Swift because I'm being bombarded during our school to home and home to school commutes. Katy Perry and Taylor Swift is what my kid is into right now. So to try to bring this a little bit back to Kierkegaard but not lose the thread of what we were talking about. I mean, I do think I have my own baggage around the notion of irony, and I don't understand. I have a hard time understanding the difference between irony and sarcasm. But from a Kierkegaardian perspective, rather than trying to get into a definition of irony that will help us distinguish whether somebody's being ironic or sarcastic or whatever the other categories are, the important thing for Kierkegaard is that irony makes free play of the imagination, free play of the individual possible.

That is a necessary condition for creativity of pretty much any sort, but certainly poetry and things like that. Probably also he would say, you know, philosophy. But even though Socrates may have sort of discovered or invented irony, and then we go through these evolutions of subjectivity and consciousness throughout the hundreds of years, and we get to Kierkegaard, irony doesn't disappear. So it's still a function of subjectivity. It's not like, oh, well, now subjectivity has evolved. We don't have some Hegelian evolution where we've left irony behind in favor of something more earnest.

Rather, irony is omnipresent in the subjective individual in the subject, to create the space and the possibility for play and exploration and so forth. And without irony, without irony really is a form of distancing from all of the boundaries, if you will. It's exchanging the boundaries of world, thought, body, etc. For the more abstract boundary of idea. Something like that.

24:16 Dylan: I see what you're talking about there in Kierkegaard, but when I was reading the Kierkegaard and listening to what you were just characterizing makes me again wonder where the boundary is in irony between any other kind of thoughtful engagement in which you are considering a hypothetical or you're engaging in a game in which that play involves establishing different rules than what exists in some kind of natural world or pretending of any sort. And if all of those things are ironic, you either have lots of categories of irony or you've neutered what you would normally mean by irony.

And so it just feels like it becomes kind of. If irony is just the possibility of saying or thinking something different from the way in which the world is, or considering multiple possibilities or all of those kinds of things that involve more than just acting in one way with one unequivocal point of view, it just seems to be too big.

25:31 Mark: The whole reason he's writing this is because irony is supposed to be something actually central to the human condition and just tied with subjectivity itself, where subjectivity, again, is not just a sense of self reflection, but it is a separating yourself from the herd. So, yeah, I do think you're right that it can't be all consideration of hypothetical possibilities and things like that. Anytime you're not acting like a robot, somehow you're being ironic. Actually, even robots can create models, you know, and look at different possibilities. Am I about to run into the wall? That can't be what I mean, ironic. No, no, that can't be just modeling. So I think it has to have some of the other qualifications that we are giving it. That is it involve. Well, we were saying an inner infinity. What does that exactly mean? Or is it negating in an important way?

26:18 Dylan: Well, the inner infinity would go towards this kind of. And the. The bad case is a kind of. It's an ungrounded freedom that is, you know, you go down that road, then you get the sort of accusations of pure relativism. You know, you're not tied to the world at all. You're sort of in this, spinning around in your solipsistic existence that everything is measured by you. That kind of problem. Maybe it's as simple as that to point to the possibility of irony being the engine for that. A kind of a chicken and egg kind of thing, is the fact that we engage in irony that's the engine for our subjectivity, or is our Potential for subjectivity. I'm thinking a little bit about our agency book that we read a little while ago. Right. The lizard isn't going to be ironic. Right. The lizard is always unironically looking for food or whatever because of the characteristic of their agency.

27:15 Mark: But Wes, that's Wes wearing the lizard on his shoulder in public as he does, is quite ironic, quite stylish.

27:25 Dylan: I do quite like the characterization that I would end up at saying, well, the activity of science is deeply ironic in the way Kierkegaard describes it, because you are pursuing something in a modeling sort of way or in a hypothetical way where you also know that it's not the whole kit and caboodle. Right. It's not the whole truth. And not sure that calling it ironic in the way in which we. I'm used to thinking of our irony is exactly hitting it on the nose.

28:00 Seth: Yeah, I agree with that, Dylan. There's a lot of strong insight grounded in actual historical positions, but there's definitely a position that's being articulated. I would be really interested to see a more modern take on irony that takes into account Kierkegaard's analysis, maybe updating it with what we would call the different categories, dramatic, Socratic, whatever, the kind of. I don't know what other kinds of irony there are, but, you know, it's an interesting exploration with an interesting thesis at its center. I just don't know exactly how to cash it out in the end.

28:41 Mark: Well, maybe we should take time, the rest of our time here to talk about romantic irony. Or rather he says the word romanticism as it was applied in his time, Schlegel and them, is just synonymous with ironic. That that is what romanticism amounts to, which is kind of a crazy thing. I don't know. Even though the Romantics that we read seem to approve of the use of irony. I don't know, they would just characterize their position as purely ironic. But this is what he finds wrong with it. It's the bad kind of irony because it is unrestricted. It does not posit.

It is not within bounds. It is not a negative that implicitly refers to an unknown positive or something like that. It is merely critical and totally unrestrained. And I think we've given some examples of how that is bad for you, right, that you're not trying to be authentically any kind of. There's no even question of. Of your being authentically a certain kind of person, because you just think, I can just create myself anew every day. And that is, according to Kierkegaard, you actually end up a slave of your whims. This is a very, you know, Socratic sort of criticism that in the Republic it seems like the tyrant should be the most free.

No, the tyrant is a slave to his desires. Well, the Romantic ironist should be the most free. But no, they're actually slave to their whims, to their moods. Yeah, I read. Despite what he actually says about the Romantics, I find a lot of parallels between what we read from the Romantics and what we're seeing in here. So like back to Schiller, I think, Dylan, you were saying. Yeah, this sounds like the play drive. And that's what Schiller was on the one hand saying. You have to have play, you have to have this freedom, but it also has to be for it to be good art.

The art imposes its own discipline. Right. So that is what specifically what Kierkegaard is criticizing the Romantic artists as not doing that. They're just too whimsical. Anything could go anywhere. Whereas a good work of art, its internal logic should dictate. How do you fill out the rest of the picture? Well, it's sort of determined in a semi law like way by what the first part of the picture that you've started is or you know, what the initial idea that you've come up with is. It should have an organic, holistic unity. And yeah, you need a certain freedom of mind and imagination to come up with that in the first place.

But you also need the discipline that comes with the limit of being in good taste. That is a limit. I remember Schlegel also saying, and maybe this is why they're too critical. We don't want just people expressing their idiosyncratic individuality. What we really want, we Romantics, is a multiplicity of voices that are all reaching toward our common oneness, how we all really are God underlyingly. And so there actually is sort of right ways that art can come out. Does it actually express the sort of Platonic truth of being that is inarticulate, or does it not?

31:40 Seth: No, it's a good point, Mark. And you said something, maybe it was in your write up of the Romantic episodes that we did about how the Romantics have kind of a very Spinozan. And that's a really important distinction because our interpretation of the Romantic creatives that I talked about, the individual creating the particular that expresses the infinite or the whatever the term is, the eternal whatever. It's not a transcendent eternal. Because ultimately, for this thing to be art and to maintain a sense of. To be art through time, it has to be able to engage subjects.

And those subjects, you know, who are not the artist, are not even of the artist's time. And to do so in a way where they too can touch on the eternal or the infinite, even if that's not necessarily in the same way or through the same experience that the other viewers had or that the artist had or intended. And for that to work. I don't think I thought this when we were doing those episodes. I think I was thinking in terms of a transcendent catching bringing down the lightning from the sky. But the idea that what it's actually expressing is not the absolute infinity, but maybe the subjective internal infinity that is accessible to all of us, that that's really what the artistic process is about.

I think that would make a lot more sense also in terms of, you know, like people who don't have the requisite level of self awareness and subjectivity, being unable to connect with the artwork to uncover that. But it makes more sense now why you were talking about Spinozan kind of immanent, like we are all God kind of a situation, as opposed to this abstract trying to connect to something totally transcendent.

33:34 Mark: I remember our first criticism of Romanticism that we read was in Hegel's Phenomenology, where he talks about the night in which all cows are black, that he does want to distinguish the stages. And Kierkegaard is following Hegel in this. You know, if you want to say in some sense we are the divine, it's not because we are right now the divine. And we should just ignore somehow the idiosyncrasies that separate me from you and see that we all have the collective unconscious or something at the center of us. Our relationship to the divine is. Is historical.

It is through history that we are sort of ever reaching and yearning towards this eventual oneness or self consciousness of God or something. That's the divine notion that Hegel at least has in mind. I don't think we've read quite enough of Kierkegaard to see whether that's the notion he has. But I think we saw enough in here that Kierkegaard has some of the same critiques of transcendence that Nietzsche does. Right? He doesn't want you to be. Kierkegaard does not want you just to be a. Just a complete despiser of temporality, of everything around you.

That is what exactly the mistake that the Romantic is making, right? That they're just saying all the phenomena that's in front of me is just all bullshit. Let's just identify a la Spinoza with the absolute right now. And that's just a very immature way of approaching the world according to both these guys, Hegel and Kierkegaard.

35:00 Dylan: Okay, I like that way of putting it. But again, it makes me feel about where the bound of irony is. So in that case, the way in which boundedness is coming in, and that would be this, makes me think about the language of actuality that Kierkegaard is using. And the only way I understand that is going to be the way the world is and presents itself. Maybe I shouldn't conflate those two things. And the challenge with the Romantics in Kierkegaard's point of view is that they're not bounded by the actual in there.

35:37 Mark: Yeah. That even if you're pointing out there's something wrong with this society, now I'm critiquing it, that still should be somehow connected to an idea of positive social change. Maybe, you know, that's still like the actual. I did find a quote on page 276. Actuality, historical actuality, stands in a twofold relation to the subject, partly as a gift that refuses to be rejected, partly as a task that wants to be fulfilled. Irony's misrelation to actuality is already sufficiently intimated by the essentially critical stance of irony. So a gift later it says the past is a gift for irony.

There never was a past. This was due to its refusal to be involved in metaphysical inquiries. It confused the eternal I with the temporal I. But the eternal I has no past, and as a result, the temporal I does not have one either. So this is. If we want to say, hey, we're not. We're all just like Spinoza says. We're just the eternal I. Your existence on earth as a temporal being is basically an illusion. Then that just leads you to neglect your actual development as an individual human being to be more ethical or more creative or anything. It's just a profoundly nihilistic point of view, even though it's parading as a religious one.

36:53 Dylan: So that's the word. A word we haven't used yet. But that does seem to be, like, the nub of the problem for the corrupt version of irony is it's nihilistic.

37:04 Mark: Yeah. I was throughout here reading he's an Existentialist. Let's think about other existentialists. I brought up Nietzsche, Beauvoir. Right. Had her sort of different ways of screwing up. And it sounds like when Kierkegaard is describing the Romantics. She's describing the stage that Beauvoir calls the adventurer. Like, you really throw yourself into something. I'm serious about this project. But then you could just on a dime, like, oh, I guess I'm not serious about that project anymore. So you could be, oh, I'm so deeply in love. But then a minute later, like, oh, well, all is folly.

I'm just really romantic. You know, I was sort of ironically in love. You don't nail yourself down to anything in particular. You could become, you know, a super religious for. But you're sort of doing it performatively, you're doing it ironically. Ironically. This is the way that I had thought of Kierkegaard. It's like, oh, you got to take a leap of faith. There's nothing that really justifies it, but you just have to decide to be a Christian now. Or maybe you could decide as in, you know, the parts of either. Or you're going to take on the aesthetic point of view, or you're going to take on the ethical point of view.

But I think here Kierkegaard is saying those are not mere choices. It's not that anybody can just, oh, just take a leap. Like, you are actually bounded by your facticity, by who you fundamentally are and your development as a human being. I don't know if that means. He might tell you, hey, you know, Dylan, you're actually not ready to be a Christian. You should go through the other stages first and then maybe dialectically you'll be ready. But he definitely doesn't think, well, I leapt this way and you leapt that way, and we're all just. There's a.

The relativism that sounds like it's built into. You just got to take an unjustified leap is not what he is for, according to this text. Yeah, I mean, I like the fact that at least he is transparent at times in this book about his Christianity, that ultimately, if you're doing irony, that does not refer in some ways to a transcendent like Christianity does, you're doing it wrong. Irony is a necessary part of life because you don't want to. I mean, it does come down to, as you were just saying, Dylan, picturing alternate possibilities. If you really just take your facticity as given this is what I was born to do, like, then you're not a serious subject.

You need that self reflection of like, what actually should I be developing into? Like. So the irony is great, but it also should be referring in somehow to a transcendent Right.

39:32 Seth: In that sense, we spoke about the notion of freedom, and then we sort of dropped it and didn't come back to it. But irony is necessary for subjective freedom in the. In the deepest sense of being able to self determine in some way, shape or form.

39:46 Mark: And that can clearly go too far. I want to point to 297. Toward the end of the book here, he's talking about poetry. If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general, it is victory over the world. It is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up to a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect, and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark. That sounds good. But then he goes on, poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it's not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living.

No transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another, a higher and more perfect actuality. The greater the contrast, the less perfect the actual reconciliation. When all is said and done, there's often no reconciliation, but rather an enmity. So even this sounds like. Wait, am I not just describing. He does get the Romantics.

40:43 Seth: Read the next sentence.

40:44 Mark: All right, all right. Therefore, only the religious is able to bring about the true reconciliation because it infinitizes actuality for me.

40:52 Seth: There you go. I think what we're all saying is something to the effect of, wow, interesting book, interesting thesis. If only if we ignore the one big axe that he has to grind. Because I can take his analysis and some of the insights and leave the notion that religious irony or religious separation freedom is somehow the peak that actualizes, infinitizes actuality for me. I can take my Spinozan interpretation of the Romantics and go on my merry way.

41:24 Mark: Right, because that sounds like. Yeah, you're contrasting, you know, with poetry. You're contrasting the drabness that is in front of you, the drab actuality, the stayedness, the machinations. He says, like we need that. Like society today, science has produced all these wonders we should see. There's something a little wrong with that. Like, we definitely need irony to come and create a distance between what we want to posit as the optimal and the actual. But we don't want that to be just a fantasy. I think is what he was saying in that paragraph that I read.

The poetic is a kind of victory over actuality, but the Infinitizing is more of an emigration from actuality than a continuance in it. To live poetically, then, is to live infinitely. But infinity can be either an external infinity or an internal infinity. The person who wants to enjoy infinity poetically does indeed have an infinity before him, but is an external one, because in my enjoying I'm continually outside myself in that other something. But an infinity such as this must cancel itself only when I, in my enjoying, am not outside myself, but inside myself.

Only then is my enjoyment infinite, because it is inwardly infinite. I don't know. Does that just sum up what we were saying before? Or is this introducing new textual problems? I know it's confusing wording.

42:44 Seth: I'm not sure that it's raises any additional complications, but it is confusing.

42:50 Mark: Even if he enjoys the whole world, the person who enjoys poetically nevertheless lacks one enjoyment, for he does not enjoy himself. There you go. It's stated in clear terms. Anyone can understand that somehow merely like, oh, I'm such a poet. I am much greater than this world, you know that that is a way of, as we were saying, being pretentious, kind of fooling yourself. It's not being honest with yourself. And you actually have to engage in some sort of peace with yourself. You want to be able to say, yes, the world should be better than it is.

I'm not exactly sure how, but I want it, you know, in a realistic way that it's so. I don't know. He doesn't get so far as to actually critique Plato for presenting. Maybe he doesn't, the part we didn't read, but for presenting Socrates vision as, you know, what we get in the phaedo, where he's describing, like, here's what, you know, the world after death might look like. And he's describing like, oh, it's got the perfect version of everything. It's got all the Platonic ideals up there, even the Platonic ideal of mud, every single thing. There's a better version like that seems to be the kind of fantasizing that Kierkegaard doesn't like very much here.

That Plato actually was taking the very sensible irony of Socrates and making it poetic in an objectionable way. Romanticism misses the highest enjoyment, the true bliss in which the subject is not dreaming, but possesses himself in infinite clarity. This is only possible for the religious individual who does not have his infinity outside himself, but inside himself.

44:24 Seth: Yeah, actually, I mean, fair enough on that. There's nothing in our characterization of romantic aesthetics that the artist has any sense of personal fulfillment. So there is a fair sense. There's. I don't know what Kierkegaard. I know he thinks that religion offers this missing element of it, and I'm sure it would, but perhaps there are other things that could as well.

44:46 Mark: Maybe it's just that the religion of the Romantics is more heathen than he would like. Remember? I mean, Schlegel is saying, we need to create a new mythology. So all these creations can't just be idiosyncratic. They have to refer to this central underlying aspect of human experience. In other words, it's got transcendence in it. It's just not the kind of transcendence that Kierkegaard likes. I mean, is that. Is that wrong? Is it really erasing? Because I didn't think. I didn't see it as right. If you're a mystic, I could see Kierkegaard not having a trouble with mysticism, because that is like saying, oh, the self is blotted out. No, no, you need yourself to be there intact, trying to be its authentic individuality. Like that.

45:25 Seth: Right.

45:25 Mark: That's his existential therapy right there. And he also doesn't want the Romantic to be like, the power of imagination. I can do anything. Because that is also a false view of yourself that is unrooted. But, yeah, it seems like, I think you were saying that we can accept those psychological observations, but not think that the only way to have a rooted self is to abandon poetry, to embrace Christianity as opposed to poetry. Like, surely there's Christian poetry. Or, you know, he should at least be less harsh on Plato than I was supposing that he is.

46:01 Dylan: There's also the issue of how do you not understand the works that he's doing where he's having the pseudonym and multiple characters as being a kind of poetry.

46:12 Mark: Here's the thing. I think we haven't made this one last point clear that from the very end of the book is he wants us to use irony, but he wants us to be masters over the irony. So it's okay to have poetry in your bag of tricks. That's great. Write poetry, but don't pretend that the poetry is your God.

46:33 Seth: Don't mistake writing poetry for transcendent transubstantiation with God.

46:41 Dylan: Yeah, Bounded poetry.

46:43 Mark: Yes. Which. So one of the things that the Romantics do say is just let it come out of you. It's bigger than you. It's coming from your subconscious. Let it be out there. But it seems like Kierkegaard is like, no, no, you got to control your poetry. You Got to control your irony sort of in the way that I was saying that Schiller said that like if you just blurt out and say, oh, I'm just the medium, then probably you have an unstructured pile of crap. That explicitly is what Kierkegaard says here, that there's, you know, that is what it is to have no unity.

But I just think that the Romantics deny that that is what comes out of you. Like if you're a bad poet trying to be a romantic poet, that's what comes out of you. But if you really are channeling the collective unconscious or whatever, the thing you're going to produce is going to be, you know, very organic and magical and much better than something that you and your little ego try to exert control over. I mean, I guess we have a ready excuse for if we don't like the Kierkegaard that we're going to read next time. Which is the first part of his either or which is a bunch of schlegel like fragments where he's taking on the guise of a romantic.

So he's satirizing Schlegel. I don't know. But like he goes on long enough that it can't be purely a negative satire. Like he's actually trying to explore this point of view from the inside out. But if we want to say after reading that, like, no, no, no. This was so obviously a put on. He wasn't really surrendering himself to the exercise. He was being too self of conscious. He was exerting control over his irony such that I didn't even enjoy reading it. Like that might be a criticism. We'll have to see what we think of it or whether what he's saying is compatible with.

Oh yeah, when you're doing the exercise, absolutely surrender to it. Become that other individual. That's the only way that you're really exploring that. But you still get to go home at night and not be that person. Like, don't be a method actor and you know, transform yourself into that. That's just psychotic.

48:43 Dylan: Well, with that preamble for either or.

48:46 Mark: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, just we could take a couple minutes to reflect on the experience of reading Kierkegaard so far. Like the whole. We've done short essays of him before. We've done Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death. We did the one on against the Internet, whatever that was. The. He wasn't actually talking about the Internet. He was. He's talking about newspapers. You know, we had that ComEd Communications one I will link folks to all those things. But most of his books, you know, the reason we haven't tried either or before is because it's so goddamn long.

And what we're going to read of it is just like two chapters of only the either half. The either half is about romanticism. The or half is about the ethical life. It doesn't even have his conclusion, you know, the religious life. So it's only in, you know, the short essays that he actually gives you the overview. Now we know what the overview of him is. I don't know, but even with this work, it was just so sprawling that I felt the number of ideas per page was very low. He was just kind of saying the same thing in many ways, in very artistic ways often.

But I would think that it just makes reading him a completely different experience than reading certainly an analytic philosopher who's like, here's my argument and I'm getting to the point about it.

49:56 Dylan: Yeah, or even reading Nietzsche. Right? I mean, to me, he definitely has a creative way with his words. And there's parts of it that I found interesting and provocative and compelling. But I'm not dying to read more. Kierkegaard. I'll be honest, I'm not.

50:11 Seth: Especially if it's like, in dialogic form. That's my least favorite. And I don't mean like platonic dialogues. I mean like dialogues concerning natural religion. Or like, okay, here's Johannes Climacus, or whatever his name is.

50:27 Mark: That's funny that the whole book is written. It's one person saying the whole first half and a separate person saying the whole second half. So in that sense it's a dialogue, even though they don't actually.

50:36 Seth: Right, then that's a way that Kierkegaard ironically removes himself from saying the thing directly. Oh, no, I have a character saying

50:44 Dylan: it when I'm reading it. There's part of me that I am torn between. Would I have found him delightful and interesting or just insufferable? And I don't know, I could try to make that decision on either or.

51:00 Mark: In light of this ambivalence, I think we're only committing to one. The next episode will for sure be on part of either or. But if we find it completely intolerable, then we can move on to other pastures. But I feel like this has been such a long neglected figure. It's so lauded in the tradition that at least I'm ready to find some good existentialist stuff out of him, even if I don't ultimately love the style or his project.

51:29 Dylan: On the positive side, I underlined lots of stuff and was engaged with big chunks of the irony. And I think that in the end I'm still a bit confused about what irony doesn't mean ultimately in his way of thinking of it. But it did pull out, particularly as an analysis of Socrates, I thought was very on point and interesting and opened up the way Socrates works to me a bit.

51:57 Mark: Yeah, that was fun. I always like revisiting the apology in one way or the other, and it made me want to read some Xenophon at some point just because it's a gap that I have. Did you ever have to read any of him? Seth?

52:09 Seth: No.

52:10 Mark: Something to look forward to. All right, folks should reach out to us. Let us know what you would like us to read. You can email us at the pel@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this@PartiallyExineLife.com we also have Facebook. We have Twitter. I'm glad to be doing this that probably people don't have strong feelings about, as opposed to the Yascha Mounk one that we just released and are feeling the flak from. But perhaps we'll discuss that on a nightcap if we can get everybody together on that. Good night everybody.

52:39 Seth: Good night.

52:40 Dylan: Good night.