Ep. 329: Kierkegaard on Irony (Part Three/Closereads Part One)

0:07 Mark: It's the Partially Examined Life, episode 329, part three. We're gonna do a close reads here. We're doing Kierkegaard's the Concept of irony from 1841. The conclusion. Conclusion, which is called irony as a controlled element. The truth of irony. It is page 324 in the text. Start us off, Wes.

0:27 Wes: It has already been pointed out in the foregoing that in his lectures on aesthetics, Solger makes irony the condition for every artistic work. When we now, in this context, say that the poet must be related ironically to his writing, this means something different from what was said about this earlier. Shakespeare has frequently been eulogized as the grand master of irony, and there can be no doubt that there is justification for that. But by no means does Shakespeare allow the substantive worth to evaporate into an ever more fugitive sublimate.

And as for the occasional culmination of his lyrics in Madness, there is an extraordinary degree of objectivity in this madness. When Shakespeare is related ironically to what he writes, it is precisely in order to let the objective dominate. Irony is now everywhere present. It sanctions every single line so that there will be neither too much nor too little in order that everything can have its due, in order that the true balance may be achieved in the miniature world of the poem whereby the poem has the center of gravity in itself.

1:36 Mark: Maybe we should stop there because it's a very long paragraph. Yeah, we're being dropped in. And we don't care about who Solger is. He's another playwright. I mean, it's. It's what is being quoted that's important. Irony is necessary for every kind of art.

1:52 Wes: I just want to say this is like the clearest thing I've ever read by Kierkegaard, and also the most enjoyable. I think he's right, in a way. Well, to the extent that I understand him. So Shakespeare is eulogized as the grandmaster of irony.

2:09 Mark: But what is the extraordinary degree of objectivity? That's what makes the irony good, as opposed to mere subjectivity. I'm not really sure I understand. Do you understand the difference here? Just throwing us in here.

2:23 Wes: I think the objectivity has to do with. You know, it strikes me as true, but it's hard to explain. So, for instance, Aaron and I, for subtext, just did The Winter's Tale, in which someone goes mad with jealousy. And even though this particular play has been criticized because the main character just suddenly gets very jealous very quickly, and it doesn't seem that there's any psychological basis for that in his previous behavior, the transition to jealousy, I think is actually masterfully portrayed. And there's lots of little triggers in the environment that you might not notice that work him up before you realize he's been worked up.

And then suddenly he flips. So there's that kind of psychological realism. That's the thing I would associate most with this idea of objectivity. But why does he think Shakespeare is the master of irony? Or why is he agreeing with critics that Shakespeare is the master of irony?

3:30 Mark: Just from context, from having read this, the surrounding section earlier, I think it is. I mean, it does come down to the. The realism, the skill that there involves a certain. He's not purely expressive.

3:44 Wes: Right.

3:45 Mark: He certainly puts a lot of emotions and things in, but he is a craftsperson. And so that's what I'm associating irony with here is the artistic difference between the artist and the work that if you purely just. I'm expressing myself, then you do not have. It is merely subjective, it is merely idiosyncratic. And it does not get at some sort of deeper objective truth that readers would be able to find as well. If you're merely reflecting your own idiosyncrasies, then it's possible that readers will be similarly designed. But it's much. That's not really the point of art. The point of art is to get these. This is exactly in line with what the Romantics, which legal were recommending that art do so far.

4:30 Wes: Yeah, yeah. I was going to say he kind of disappears into the background. That was going to be my take on this with irony. Him and his point of view aren't overwhelmingly present. His poetry is very present. But it's as if he lets the characters be what they are. And that's part of what gives them a life of their own. And that's part of what accentuates the realism, strangely enough, even though the stories themselves are often fantastic.

4:58 Mark: And just to try to think of. If irony is characterized overall as negation, as. It can only just be that he's not. If you put yourself in with it as the writer, then you are advocating it. And there's not that artistic distance between you and the work. You know, that's like arguing positively for a philosophical proposition. Whereas in the earlier parts of this book he was praising Socrates is negative approach to philosophy. And that is the ironic approach. So it's sort of. I'm just saying, you know, so it's like Shakespeare is presenting us with this simulacrum of. Of reality and just saying this is the truth. As I see it, like, I'm not approving, I'm not disapproving. This is just what it is.

5:44 Wes: This is what the poet Keats called negative capability. Instead of irritably reaching after reasons and truths, you submit yourself to the, you know, the poetic truth. So Shakespeare, for instance, isn't eager to condemn the villain, even in some subtle way. Right? Everyone knows you'd be a hack if you're just trying to, you know, if the villain or the person who's acting, acting in a villainous way at any given point is just presented as a kind of caricature. Ooh, I'm evil. Instead, we get a. In a sense, we always get a sympathetic portrait in the sense that we always get the underlying psychology.

So negative capability and irony, I think, are related here. And also this position of feigned naivete, which came up in the episode, and you guys were talking about the relationship between rhetorical irony, saying the opposite, let's say, and especially the expression of that in sarcasm, and trying to relate that to Socratic irony. And I think in both of those, you get feigned naivete. So Socrates pretending not to know, in a sense, he doesn't know. In a sense he does. That's the thing. So if he says, all I know is my own ignorance, okay, but he knows it in a much different way, right, Than the average person.

He knows more than the people that he's antagonizing. So clearly he does know more than them and clearly what he's doing. Often when he makes bad arguments, that the bad arguments are meant to teach a lesson, or the dialectical arguments in which he makes other people's positions collapse, which sometimes are also bad arguments. That dialectical position, it's very similar to Hegel, in which you simply observe the position or you bring its light and you let it defeat itself, which takes him out of the picture to some extent. But even in rhetorical irony, there's feigned naivete.

So if I go into, I'm reading a really great book now, is it unfrozen?

7:54 Mark: Caveman, lawyer? That's what I've been thinking.

7:58 Wes: It's by an English professor whose name is now escaping me. But I'll talk about this book some other time. But anyway, it's really, really one of the best things I've read on humor in general. But the example he uses is someone walks into an office and says, and they have a co worker who has really bad handwriting. It looks like chicken scratch. And they say, oh, I didn't know you could do shorthand So a bit of sarcasm. There's a feigned naivete, right? Oh, I'm so stupid. I think your bad handwriting is shorthand. And that kind of feigned naivete always happens in that sarcastic, attacking irony, which is like the prototypical example.

Someone messes something up, you say, oh, great job. You're pretending like you think this person did a great job. You're asking them to inhabit that position with you where someone is so stupid as to think the terrible thing that you did is a good or great job. So the feigned naivete is always a part of it.

8:57 Mark: All right? So he's just said irony is in every word. Shakespeare lets the objective dominate. The greater the contrasts in the movement, the more is irony required to direct and control the spirits and that willfully want to charge forward. The more irony is present, the more freely and poetically the poet floats above his artistic work. Therefore, irony is not present at some particular point of the poem, but is omnipresent in it, so that the irony visible in the poem is in turn ironically controlled. Therefore, irony simultaneously makes the poem and the poet free.

But in order for this to happen, the poet himself must be master over the irony. But this does not always mean that just because a poet manages to be master over the irony at the time of writing, he's master over it in the actuality to which he himself belongs. It is customarily said that the poet's personal life is of no concern to us. This is absolutely right. But in the present undertaking, it should not be out of place to point out the misrelation that can often exist in this respect.

9:58 Wes: Okay, so it's not a simple task to float above your work. There's some kind of craft and mastery and attitude, I think psychological attitude. I think there's some of. It's just impulse control. It's hard not to caricature the villain, for instance. And even that might even come out unconsciously, even if you don't want to do it.

10:22 Mark: It's hard for me not to put in little 4th wall breaking comments or something to I. I want to comment on, you know, but, you know, you gotta. You gotta actually dress that up in the artistic. So what you were just saying about the feigned simplicity. It's like we're. We as Americans at least do sarcasm wrong because it has that, oh, great job. Whereas good sarcasm should just be, you know, I see you do an obviously stupid thing. I'm like, great job. And you're like, well, fuck you. It should make you want.

11:00 Wes: Yeah, the drier the better. Yeah, but some of this varies on context. If you say that line about the shorthand to a friend who knows they have bad handwriting, it's much less of an attack. And part of the feigned innocence or naivete is to give yourself an alibi to the attack. Like, oh, I didn't, wasn't meaning to attack you, even though both of you know that, you know. So it's a weird thing. But if someone knows they have bad handwriting and it's something you joke about all the time and they could go, yeah, they could go along with. You guys could riff off that and you could go along with.

I could, you know, you say that to me and I'd say, yeah, my mom really, she taught me calligraphy or something. And you could just go back and forth. But if it's someone you don't know, or maybe you have an antagonistic relationship and you say that to them, that's just an attack. So it really can range between something good humored, where you're assisting someone else's self deprecation or maybe even you know that they have a harsh inner critic and you're trying to pretend to be that harsh inner critic so you give them a perspective on how silly it seems when it's outside of them.

You can actually be doing it in a way that's trying to alleviate their own self attack. There are all these complicated layers. But in this case I find it really interesting. He's pointing to this distinction between like the kind of self control and control that would go into artistic irony and the fact that you may not be able to do any of that in your own personal life. Because a sense of irony I think would make one less self attacking, for instance. That's just one of the things it might do.

12:37 Mark: Yeah. I don't think we spelled out in the full episode how one could be earnest and ironic at the same time. But I think the kind of thing that you're talking about, if somebody makes, you know, a terrible and obvious mistake and they're probably about to attack themselves about, and you're like, that's not the way to do it. Come on, you know, you know, you, you make it gentler.

12:56 Wes: Exactly.

12:57 Mark: You're speaking in in or you're saying literally what should be said but that nobody would actually say it that way if they were, you know, be actually criticizing you.

13:08 Wes: Right. Again, I think they're trying to help you in some of those circumstances. We try to help each other. I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been Trying to observe my own irony and situations and ask myself, well, what motivates it? Often I think it's anxiety. It's some kind of threat or anxiety. What motivates in this situation? Why are we joking around? Really think about the psychological dynamics of it, which I think is what you have to do do to really understand it. And what I haven't seen done except in this book, which ironically I can't remember the name of the author right now because I'm. Dementia is, is gradually setting in. But, but we'll put it in the

13:48 Mark: episode notes making it dramatic irony to

13:50 Wes: you right now the audience knows what it is exactly. That's perfect. But this whole thing in the per, you know, personal life versus being an artist. Some people are really good at being kind to their characters and kind to the substance of their work. But can they do that to themselves? Maybe he's talking about more than that. I'm immediately associating to that in particular where you are a character in your own narrative but you caricature yourself. You're not floating above yourself. You're so deeply invested in. Maybe it's in the future, maybe it's in one's ideal self. Right. You're so forward looking that the present, you can't let the present just be the present.

14:32 Mark: Well, and just discussing like, you know, what are your purposes for irony? Like we'll talk about this actually tomorrow we're recording on either or the beginning from, from Kierkegaard and he's depicting this sort of romantic character talking about himself. And it's sort of like if, if joking about everything is just a default thing that you do because sort of what the hell else is there to do with life? There's something kind of nihilistic and graveyard humor about it that maybe is not the best attitude to have, you know, when irony is all consuming. And I, you know, I take this critique entirely personally. So

15:12 Wes: yeah, I mean maybe it's a particular kind of irony. So there's the kind of good natured self soothing irony that I've been describing. And then there's sarcasm, there's bitter cynical sarcasm where. So there's and the same thing, there's negative capability in Keats sense where you're not irritably reaching after reasons. But then there's just the whole, oh yeah, I don't believe anything and you know, not even in right and wrong and everyone sucks and blah blah blah. You could not believe in anything in the world in the sense that you're just disaffected. With it and you can't take anything seriously anymore.

15:53 Mark: I mean, you've now given the counter argument to my own self critique, which is I think the sort of gentle, we're all in it together sort of irony. Like I think it's very hard for me to tell the difference between gentle we're all in it together irony. And you know, what are you going to do? Like what that sort of. Is that nihilistic? Or is that this is just the style by which we live, which is maybe deflationary upon, you know, there's no grand things we should be reaching towards, so we might as well engage in Seinfeld esque chatter about the weather or whatever. There's really nothing more important to bother with.

16:31 Wes: Yeah.

16:32 Mark: Which is fundamentally the thing that Kierkegaard is going to be against. Like no, there are serious ethical things, there are serious religious things that should be directing your life. And so living in this, it is to him a form of nihilism. But, but one could respond and say, no, actually you are being the serious man. Those are, those are bullshit. And this is the only reasonable way to be. I don't want to. We're about to have a whole discussion on that.

16:57 Wes: So yeah, we can move forward. But yeah, it's all on how. It depends on how it affects the way you function in life. And does it make you a nihilist or does, does it help you get things done or does it just make you give up? And people often face this problem, if I'm too kind to myself, well, how would I get any. Get anything done? I have to crack the whip. It's a similar sort of problem where it's like, stop attacking yourself. But well, what am I, Am I just going to eat Doritos on the couch all day? Then

17:26 Mark: what do you go?

17:27 Wes: How do I do things without attacking myself?

17:29 Mark: But anyway, all right, top of 325.

17:33 Wes: In addition, the less the poet remains in the immediate position of genius, the greater becomes the significance of this misrelation. The more the poet has abandoned this, the more necessary it is for him to have a totality view of the world and in this way to be master over irony in his individual existence. And the more necessary it becomes for him to be a philosopher to a certain degree. If this is the case, then the individual poetic work will not have a merely external relation to the poet. In the individual poem he will see an element in his own development.

The reason Goethe's poet existence was so great was that he was able to make his poet life congruous with his actuality. But that in turn takes irony. But please note controlled irony. For the romanticist, the individual poetic work is either a darling favorite with which he is himself utterly infatuated and which he cannot explain to himself how could he possibly have given life to it, or it is an object that arouses disgust. Both responses, of course, are false. The truth of the matter is that the individual work is an element. In Goethe, irony was in the strictest sense a controlled element.

It was a serving spirit to the poet. On the one hand, the individual poem rounds itself off in itself by means of the irony in it. On the other hand, the individual poetic work emerges as an element and thereby the whole poet existence rounds itself off by means of irony. As poet, Professor Heiberg takes the same position. And while almost every line of dialogue he has written can provide an example of irony's inner economy in the play, all of his plays exhibit the conscious striving to assign to every particular line its place in the whole. Here then, the irony is controlled, is reduced to an element.

The essence is nothing other than the phenomenon. The phenomenon is nothing other than the essence. Possibility is not so prudish as to be unwilling to enter into any actuality, but actuality is possibility. Goethe, both the striving and the victorious. Goethe, has always acknowledged this view, has continually articulated this view very energetically. So we keep in mind that poetry is often drama. That's typically what he's thinking of as plays.

20:06 Mark: Yeah, no, there's a lot that was a whole page of a paragraph he had been previously talking about the misrelation that can exist between the poet's personal life and the work. Right.

20:17 Wes: Yeah.

20:18 Mark: We should not actually care about the personal life, but okay, so the less the poet remains in the immediate position of genius, the greater becomes the significance of this misrelation between the personal life and the work. What is the immediate position of genius?

20:34 Wes: I don't know, but it sounds like, you know, a genius can be. Can afford to be the person who's very disordered in their personal life and yet capable of great poetry. But if they're more of a workaday type person, then they. It sounds like he's saying they need to have be a master of irony in their individual existence in order to make it work in the poem or play itself to be a philosopher.

21:06 Mark: So if you're a genius, then you are just idiot savant, like channeling the divine and good on you. Yeah, but probably. I was just with some people yesterday who were saying it's just Amazing. We're talking about sequels and things. And you know, it's amazing enough when you can create, when an artist can create one thing that resonates, you know, the first Star wars movie or whatever. And like anything after that should just be gravy. And like it's, it's very unlikely that any follow ups or whatever are gonna have anything of the punch. Well, yeah, okay.

If you take that as you've stumbled on something that maybe what genius is. This being in the immediate position of genius is stumbling on the divine. And this way, like something that really resonates. Okay, well, even the greatest genius, Shakespeare, say, or Goethe, I don't know, is, is not going to stumble in that way. So the more that you, you're just. Okay, I had the divine inspiration, but now I want to have the rest of my career. I'm still a very good craftsperson. You know, you want to take the attitude of a workaday artist, as you were saying, but you know, you still want to have.

Make your work as great as possible. You're someone who's capable of genius. How can you push your work so you don't have to stumble across the divine, that you can, you know, make it consistently very strong. Well, become a philosopher to some degree, be a master of irony in your individual existence. This is exactly what Nietzsche was, was criticizing Goethe. That Goethe became a zealot for Christianity later in his work. And I don't know the time periods where exactly Kierkegaard was writing this in relation to what Goethe had produced. You know, maybe Goethe hadn't made this turn yet, but it seems like Kierkegaard would have been just fine with that turn toward more ascetic Christianity.

And so the fact that he was able to live that life and not just, you know, that seems like a very high degree of integrity that, that Goethe has exhibited, according to Kierkegaard. Whereas, you know, nature just saw this as, as just a failure to take on the fundamental challenge of life, you know, accepting the, the absurd or what, however he would put it.

23:15 Wes: Yeah, well, Nietzsche had turned against Romanticism and Wagner. Right. The great representative of that Romanticism.

23:24 Mark: And, and I'm confusing Wagner and Goethe.

23:27 Wes: Oh, are you okay?

23:28 Mark: Sorry. He criticized Wagner for exactly this thing. God damn.

23:32 Wes: All right, sorry. But I don't think it's unrelated. So. And then I think Kierkegaard's relationship to Romanticism is complicated because he seems in a way like a romantic, but then he's a critic of it. But anyway, I mean, that could be

23:49 Mark: just like, like the existentialists, half of the existentialists, or most of the existentialists that were, like, too cool for the word existentialism and thought that what they were doing specifically was so much, you know, so maybe he's a romantic and he's just. Yeah, that's the nature of Romanticism is

24:05 Wes: to be contrary to Nietzsche, you know. But I was going to say Nietzsche foresaw how catastrophic Romanticism was going to be for Germany because it was connected to German nationalism and back to the, you know, soil and blood and ethnic ethno nationalism and all that stuff and anti Semitism. And he was completely right about that. I mean, ironically, right. Nietzsche looks and writes a little bit like a romantic and was able to be appropriated. He's very pro Semite, very anti nationalist, very anti romantic. But he was used by those people because he talks about things like the will and instinct and is against slave morality, all that stuff.

24:48 Mark: But let's zoom in in the middles. For the Romanticist, the individual poetic work is either a darling favorite with which he himself is utterly infatuated, which he cannot explain to himself. In other words, he sees himself as the genius. I just. This just rolled out of me. I. Or it is an object that arouses his disgust. I've heard a lot of musicians that I've interviewed that are like, I don't listen to my old stuff. I don't, you know, or, you know, as soon as it comes out of me, it's gone. It's sort of. It is like their shit.

25:16 Wes: Yeah.

25:18 Mark: It's the doing of it that is the purpose, not the having it there to a frame.

25:23 Wes: Yeah, but why is it either.

25:25 Mark: Or.

25:26 Wes: And how does irony help? I mean, I'm familiar with this. You write a poem or you do something like that, and you're, ooh, look how great I am. This is amazing. And then five minutes later, you're like, oh, my God, that's terrible. Absolutely terrible. And if you're a writer, you're kind of always pushing through that. I think Annie Dillard or Anne Lamott, maybe. Anyway, someone wrote a great essay called Shitty First Drafts and kind of made it out. Kind of claim that the whole key to writing is persistence in the sense you have to deal with the blow to your pride involved in looking at those first drafts, which are always bad, and then trying to work through them and craft them. So maybe that requires some degree of irony. Obviously, if you're too infatuated, you're probably just delusional and you can't actually do anything. To refine your work. And if it arouses disgust, I don't know.

26:28 Mark: Well, it says both responses are false. The truth of the matter is the individual work is an element. So it's an element in your life.

26:34 Wes: This is something that you did.

26:36 Mark: Well, that's what he literally. The next sentence is what he said. Yeah. In Goethe, irony was the strictest sense, a controlled element. It was a serving spirit to the poet. So irony is an element of the work on the one hand, and then the work as an element in what he doesn't really say.

26:53 Wes: Irony is an element. Irony is a controlled element.

26:58 Mark: Right. To serve the pun before that.

27:00 Wes: Okay.

27:01 Mark: The individual work is an element.

27:02 Wes: All right.

27:04 Mark: I like that idea of, you know, take a Hegelian approach to your own work. Like, yeah, your first draft was bad, but the next one's going to be better. Like, both of those responses, like, I don't know how I gave birth to this thing, Isn't it wonderful? Or geez, okay, I just crap that out. Both of those are not taking responsibility for the work. You know, you have to. Even though we don't consciously control every little thing, and I don't think Kierkegaard is recommending that we, you know, that you wouldn't actually create anything if you had to be that self conscious about it. But, you know, it's a. It's a matter of interaction back and forth with the things that we create and then we react to. To those in the future things we create or in improving those things. And yeah, it's all just part of the process of hopefully becoming a better and better artist.

27:55 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I like your idea of the individual work as an element, as some manifestation of a particular point in one's life. I don't know if that's what you were saying. So you can. You have a certain.

28:10 Mark: Have an artistic life, but yeah, yeah,

28:11 Wes: you have a certain detachment from it. That's where the irony comes in. You're not idealizing it or catastrophizing about it. It is what it is. You did your best to craft it. It's a reflection of your person in some sense. But anyway. All right.

28:32 Mark: And then talks about this Heiberg, who. Yes, we don't care who Heiberg is, but he apparently includes irony in a very nice controlled way as an element. And then it gets the latter part of what you read, where it gets a little confusing. The essence is nothing other than the phenomenon. The phenomenon is nothing other than the essence. Now, this refers very strongly to things that were said earlier, you know, that if you're too ironic, then you're always saying the essence is somewhere else. These phenomenon in front of me, I'm going to treat them, I'm going to purely negate them, I guess, in your own work. I mean, why would it be. It sounds like, don't be ironic. Why is he saying this is the right way to do irony?

29:14 Wes: Yeah. From the concept of irony, it seemed as if irony involves this contradiction between essence and phenomenon, the phenomenon being what it is you are saying on the surface and the essence being the true significance of what you're doing or saying. Why would the phenomenon here coincide with the essence? I mean, maybe I'm reminded of Nietzsche's phrase superficiality or profundity out of superficiality, so that you get to a point where the aesthetic surface of the thing is the profound part of. Doesn't become profound by signifying anything deeper. Or superficiality out of. I don't know, I can't remember the phrase. But in any case. Right.

30:00 Mark: It was part of that fashion episode too, that this was sort of.

30:04 Wes: Yeah, perhaps it has something to do with. This is something particular to artistic activity itself. So it's one thing to do rhetorical irony. It's one thing to do Socratic irony. It's another thing to be doing art where one can see why it's necessary that the phenomenon be the essence so that what's happening in the story is not. You're not trying to communicate a message. In other words, you don't have a secret agenda behind the narrative for which the story. The narrative is an ulterior motive, something like that. I don't know if I'm on the right track here.

30:47 Mark: So maybe he explains this. Essence is nothing other than the phenomenon. Phenomenon is nothing other than the essence with the next sentence. Possibility is not so prudish as to be unwilling to enter into any actuality, but actuality is possibility. So that seems, you know, again, sort of looking at this bad faith Sartrean existentialist you are, if you say my actuality is my possibility, my actuality is my essence. I mean, that's another way of saying the phenomenon is the essence. That seems like bad faith. That seems like unironic. Well, you should have a loose relation with actuality.

You should not reject actuality and say my possibility is freedom. And it is. Is ever revolving. And it does. No, no, do the thing. It really is a part of you. It's an aspect of you, but it is only an aspect. It's not the whole thing. So the actuality, you know, whether it's your life or this artwork you have created, that is one of your possibilities. It is, you know, take responsibility for it, but don't equate it with yourself. It's merely an element.

31:52 Wes: Yeah, I like that. That sounds right.

31:55 Mark: Next paragraph. After all, what holds for the poet Existence holds also in some measure for every single individual's life. In other words, the poet does not live poetically by creating a poetic work. Or if it does not stand in any conscious and inward relation to him, his life does not have the inner infinity that is an absolute condition for living poetically. Thus we also see poetry frequently finding an outlet through unhappy individualities. Indeed, the painful destruction of the poet is a condition for the poetic production. That was all a parenthetical his life does not have the inner infinity that's a condition for living poetically.

But he lives poetically only when he himself is oriented and thus integrated in the age in which he lives, is positively free in the actuality to which he belongs. But anyone can live poetically in this way. But the rare gift, the divine good fortune to be able to let what is poetical experience take shape and form itself poetically remains, of course, the enviable fate of the chosen few.

32:55 Wes: He seems to be arguing against the kind of tragic artist who, you know, who puts themselves in opposition to society. And maybe they're self destructive and hey, all my favorite jazz artists were heroin addicts. And I'm just gonna do heroin and be this countercultural, drug addicted, whatever, right? I'm going to reject all the norms of society and disengage from it and be a poet that way. And I think he's rejecting that. Right. I got that from the painful destruction of the poet is conditioned for the poetic production. As if I have to be the agonized artist and inhabit a position of nihilism or something.

33:41 Mark: Yeah, it's hard for me to tell the poet existence, like whether this is something that I know. Throughout a lot of the section he's been just saying, we don't want the poet existence. To reduce yourself to the poet is to debase yourself. Doing poetry is fine, but living the poet existence is too much. Or is he saying, well, there's good ways of doing the poet existence and there's bad ways of doing the poet existence. Any poet is living the poet existence. It's just a question of how you approach it. You do need the inner infinity.

34:16 Wes: And he does seem to be endorsing living poetically. Poet does not live poetically. Yeah, but and that's associated with the inner.

34:23 Mark: Having the inner infinity is so that I think that that meant that, you know, you retained that, that distance inwardly. I could create anything I can. You know, I have a flexibility of mind that allows me to change my attitude towards things as opposed to the outer infinity, which is bad. Which is to say I'm not, I'm going to actually settle on anything. I'm not going to. I'm not going to be a poet, I'm not going to be a religious person. I'm just going to merely play, act, all those things. That is, Is that right, that that's the outer infinity? That shows you have a lack of integrity, whereas someone has the inner infinity. Well, that's just a mental flexibility. And that's, that's a good thing. And you need that for poetic, that sort of part and parcel of needing irony to make art at all.

35:12 Wes: Yeah. I think he's saying you have to stay engaged with life and in habit. This goes towards what you were saying with existentialism. Right. We have essences and we have social responsibilities. We have our personalities and things that we have to do and our roles to play. And as the artist, we don't simply disengage from that to be nothing but the poet, we have to live those out, but with some sort of ironic relation to them. Not meaning that we're nihilists and we're just play acting, but knowing that that's not, if you're looking at it from the standpoint of an existentialist, that we are also free and free to interpret that experience and in this case, that we're not entirely invested in that role.

And even in the ethical standpoint, I'm just thinking forward to. Even to our role as ethical people. I think for Kierkegaard there's something higher than that. And that's the religious standpoint, that's the standpoint of faith. So even when we're very focused on living our lives ethically, we have to be able to stand back from that. That's not the ultimate, that's not the absolute. Is that make any sense or.

36:35 Mark: Yeah, no, I. I think that makes sense. So the first step in that maturity is living integrated in the age in which you live, but yet positively free in the actuality to which you belong. So that's at least going to get you out of the aesthetic, the poetic point of view. But you're right, if you were strictly ethical, well, you probably wouldn't make any poetry, Right?

36:58 Wes: Yeah.

36:58 Mark: That we need something beyond that. The Religious is what's going to end up actually hooking you back up to the muse, you know, in a dialectical fashion, that the. That the poetic is sort of the default, that the people of his age, you know, that he's criticizing, lived in. And the ethical is a. Is a needed and obvious response to that. And the religions are supposed to synthesize them.

37:20 Wes: Yeah, yeah. With Schiller, we saw this idea that the aesthetic, in a way, is prior to the ethical and grounds it. And it's through an aesthetic education that you would even get the ethical. When I think about these guys and this trajectory that we're doing in Romanticism, thinking about, well, what's more fundamental? What's the priority? And I think the Romantics, we're trying to take it back to the aesthetic as a way of getting in touch with the absolute, which is kind of making the aesthetic into a quasi religious experience. And Kierkegaard seems to want to disentangle those two things and put faith ahead, both of the ethical and the aesthetic.

38:06 Mark: So anybody can live poetically in the good way of having the right. However, of course, he says, few people can actually let what is poetically experienced take shape and form itself poetically. In other words, actually create artworks that are. That. That capture this thing, this experience that we can all have if we're well adjusted.

38:25 Wes: Right. All right. To be controlled in this way, to be halted in the wild infinity into which it rushes ravenously, by no means indicates that irony should now lose its meaning or be totally discarded. On the contrary, when the individual is properly situated, and this he is, through the curtailment of irony, only then does irony have its proper meaning, its true validity. In our age, there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship. But what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. Just as scientists maintain that there is no true science, without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.

As soon as irony is controlled, it makes a movement opposite to that in which uncontrolled irony declares its life. Irony limits, finitizes or finitizes and circumscribes, and thereby yields truth, actuality, content. It disciplines and punishes, and thereby yields balance and consistency. Irony is disciplinarian, feared only by those who do not know it, but loved by those who do. Anyone who does not understand irony at all, who has no ear for its whispering, lacks eo ipso precisely. Thereby what could be called the absolute beginning of personal life.

He lacks what momentarily is indispensable for personal life. He lacks the bath of regeneration and rejuvenation, irony's baptism of purification that rescues the soul from having its life in finitude, even though it is living energetically and robustly in it. He does not know the refreshment and strengthening that come with undressing when the air gets too hot and heavy. And diving into the sea of irony, not in order to stay there, of course, but in order to come out healthy, happy and buoyant and to dress again. Awesome.

40:32 Mark: Yeah, that paragraph is why I want us to do this.

40:36 Wes: Really? Awesome. Yeah. So irony is not this thing where you detach from life and you're not earnest about anything. In the same way that doubt doesn't mean you stop looking for the truth and stop doing science. In a way, those two things are necessary to each other. And if that's the case, Socratic skepticism motivates inquiry. It doesn't motivate giving up. It's not relativism. And I wonder if irony plays this role in life. It can encourage one to seek out situations in which you are. In other words, it can motivate you to seek out dedication in life or faith. It can have actually that effect. You know, it's like the old idea that faith and doubt are actually intricately related and can't be disentangled.

41:32 Mark: So maybe one of the things wrong with romanticism is that, like Rousseau, it might glorify a lack of reflectivity that, you know, I just wish I could unironically enjoy my relationships. I wish I could unironically enjoy this shitty pop music that you're listening to. I wish I could unironically get angry. Like, this is what the romantic. And I think Nietzsche might be guilty of some of this. Certainly he sounds like this some of the time, but like Kierkegaard, you know, he would admit that, like, you know, we can't turn back the clock.

42:10 Wes: You can't.

42:11 Mark: There's no point in just then being in despair that you can't attain this innocence.

42:17 Wes: Right.

42:17 Mark: We don't want to go back in Nietzsche's terms, to. To the master morality of these blonde beasts unreflectedly. Like, no, we've gone through the process of becoming inward, of reflecting on ourselves for, for. For Nietzsche. That is Christian self torture. And so what is the. The next dialectical step we should come out of that with is something that, yes, we do seize the day and get into things and really involve ourselves and have deep, honest. Then we can pull back at any point and kind of observe ourselves and get into it and pull back and do this in a controlled way. This is the art of living is like not getting too far into it, but also not standing always on the outside, not feeling anything.

43:06 Wes: Yeah, it reminds me of that. It reminds me of the Stoic distinction between good and bad on the one hand, and what is preferable and not preferable on the other. Because the typical critique of the Stoic was that, well, you're just advocating complete disengagement from life. Why would anyone do anything? And then the Stoic comes back and says, well, no, there's still what is preferable and not preferable, and I'm still going to be working. I'm still going to be rich and working for the emperor if I want, in the case of Seneca, until I have to kill myself.

So that living life and dedication and commitment and those sorts of things are not incompatible with Stoicism or with irony or any number of other positions like that. In the same way that science is not incompatible with doubt. What doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. You need to be able to stand back from seeing things that, you know, the latest scientific discovery in order to be able to continue to refine it. So whatever it is that you're taking earnestly in your personal life, if it's to have any forward trajectory, we also need to be able to stand back from that.

And you can see this in politics, right? People get wrapped up in a political position to the point where it interferes generally with their cognitive processes and ability to enjoy life. It's not just about reflecting on the political position and refining it, although I think that's important. It has a very general. You become the serious man. It has a very general effect on one's character. So you have to be able to care passionately about some political issue without it robbing you of your humanity, for instance, and making it so that you are, you know, because you care about justice for one group of people, you're demonizing some other swath of people.

Something like that.

45:13 Mark: So the thing we're going to be looking for, as I think you know, to the extent that we get so far enough in Kierkegaard to think about his religiosity, is whether he is guilty of being the serious man or whether this take on irony allows him that. No, no, he's post. He's two dialectical steps past that. And I think of Ricoeur, that the Ricoeur episode that he was specifically like, yeah, I want to be a Christian, but I want to be a Christian post Nietzsche, post Marx, I want to take those critiques into account and not be drawn into, you know, so maybe that you.

One of the things that comes out of that is you, you sort of live lightly in a way you don't. You know, he was specifically. We're reading that in the context of how do you read specific passages from the Bible? And you certainly don't read them such that, you know, a man who lies with a man shall die and then become like some sort of fanatic anti gay bigot or whatever like that. There are more subtle ways. In line with keeping it in perspective, I guess, is the way that we would put that. You know, if you're a very politically oriented guy, you know, be an activist, but keep it in perspective.

Be a stoic activist, be a. An activist who is still open to alternate points of view, etc. And so the same thing, oddly enough, should be the case with religion. Even though religion should be the thing, according to Kierkegaard, that you fully leap into with your whole heart. Well, is it with your whole heart or is just the structure of the heart such that it can't actually make itself the servant? You know, if you say, I am now choosing God, so therefore I am the servant of God, I am abnegating my free choice. Like that would be a wrong approach to religion.

You have to actually be a human being who is religious, not a religious automaton.

46:59 Wes: Yeah, I like that. Although I'm. Yeah. Now I do find this confusing. Yeah. Is he just trying to have his cake and eat it too? Yeah. I don't know how irony works with faith, how those fit together. Exactly.

47:12 Mark: All right, continuing page 327. Therefore, if at times someone is heard talking with great superiority about irony, in the infinite striving in which it runs wild, one may certainly agree with him. But insofar as he does not perceive the infinity that moves in irony, he stands not above but below irony. So he's not controlling his irony. So it is always, whenever we disregard the dialectic of life, it takes courage not to surrender to the shrewd or sympathetic council of despair that allows a person to erase himself from the number of the living.

But this does not necessarily mean that every sausage peddler, fed and fattened on self confidence has more courage than the person who has succumbed to despair. It takes courage when sorrow would delude one, when it reduced all joy to sadness, all longing to privation, every hope to recollection. It takes courage to will to be happy. But this does not necessarily mean that Every full grown adult infant, with his sweet sentimental smile, his joy intoxicated eyes, has more courage than the person who yielded to grief and forgot to smile. So it is also with irony.

Even though one must warn against irony as against a seducer, so must one also commend it as a guide.

48:27 Wes: Okay, yeah. I love all the stuff about the, you know, sausage peddlers fed and fattened on self confidence. So that's not courage necessarily. And we can't compete. You can't, can't look at them compared to the person who commits suicide and say, you know, yeah, the person who committed suicide is a coward. People who are just kind of smug and self content unreflectively in life, they're the ones who are courageous and happy. So what is he saying at the very end here? So it is with. Also with irony. What's the analogy here? I'm trying to connect this to.

49:04 Mark: I mean irony being self consciousness and ultimately disengagement and a tendency towards nihilism.

49:11 Wes: Right.

49:12 Mark: So you want that disengagement, but as we've been saying in measured doses, it's definitely better to be the nihilist. That is a step further from being a mere unreflective. You don't want to be the blonde beast. You want to at least get to the despiser of life. But we want to get past despiser of life.

49:30 Wes: The blonde beast somehow became a sausage peddler. So yeah, so you don't want to be the smug, unreflective, quote unquote confident person in the same way that you don't want to be the nihilist style of ironist. And yet confidence is something we want and irony is something we want when they are done. Right.

49:54 Mark: And Kierkegaard, unlike Nietzsche in making this point, is not bringing in sexism here at least he talks about the full grown adult infant with his sweet sentimental smile, his joy intoxicated eyes. I could very clearly see Nietzsche saying something obnoxious about, you know, the female figures in his life.

50:12 Wes: Yeah, it's time, it's time for infants to start getting theirs. I mean adult infants, they've been sexism, racism. There's got to be something that's just focused on infants, child childism or whatever.

50:27 Mark: How dare you condemn this infant is childish. No, actually that, that's a stereotype that works pretty well. That's okay. We're okay with that.

50:35 Wes: Yeah,

50:37 Mark: keep going.

50:38 Wes: Yeah. So did you just read the last

50:40 Mark: one Commanded as a guide? Yeah, we have the last paragraph still

50:43 Wes: in 327, particularly in our age, we do have a bit more. Are we going to get through it today?

50:51 Mark: We have two and a quarter pages still left in this.

50:54 Wes: And how many have we read?

50:56 Mark: Three and a half.

50:57 Wes: All right, so, yeah, let's do. Let's do another part on that.

51:01 Mark: All right.

51:02 Wes: This is great. This is great. I wish there was. Were a part of the. Part of the official reading.

51:05 Mark: So, I mean, I added it, but I don't think Dylan got to the end of this. It was, you know, if you're going to have a whole section on. On the playwright Solger here that you have to skip over, then one might get tired. I think that is the theme of our Kierkegaard, is that you might get tired before the good part.

51:24 Wes: Yeah, I have to say. Yeah, it's hard going. It really is hard going. This, you know, if it were all like, this would be amazing. But he's very. He's. It's like, you know, it's like going to see experimental art or something like that. You just have to gird your loins for it.

51:42 Mark: Well, thanks for your support. So long, everybody.

51:45 Wes: Bye.