The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates

By Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Howard V. Hong
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-02072-3

Contents

Historical Introduction,
The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates,
Theses,
Part One THE POSITION OF SOCRATES VIEWED AS IRONY,
Introduction,
I The View Made Possible,
II The Actualization of the View,
III The View Made Necessary,
Appendix Hegel's View of Socrates,
Part Two THE CONCEPT OF IRONY,
Introduction,
Observations for Orientation,
The World-Historical Validity of Irony, the Irony of Socrates,
Irony after Fichte,
Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony,
Addendum NOTES OF SCHELLING'S BERLIN LECTURES,
Supplement,
Key to References,
Original Title Pages of The Concept of Irony,
Original First Page (manuscript) of Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures,
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers Pertaining to The Concept of Irony,
Editorial Appendix,
Acknowledgments,
Collation of The Concept of Irony in the Danish Editions of Kierkegaard's Collected Works,
Notes,
Bibliographical Note,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The View Made Possible [XIII 109]

We shall now move to a summary of the views of Socrates provided by his closest contemporaries. In this respect there are three who command our attention: Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes. I cannot fully agree with Baur, who thinks that, along with Plato, Xenophon should be most highly regarded. Xenophon stopped with Socrates' immediacy and thus has definitely misunderstood him in many ways; whereas Plato and Aristophanes have blazed a trail through [XIII 110] the tough exterior to a view of the infinity that is incommensurable with the multifarious events of his life. Thus it can be said of Socrates that just as he walked through life continually between a caricature and the ideal, so after his death he continues to stroll between those two. As for the relation between Xenophon and Plato, Baur is correct in saying on page 123: "Zwischen diesen Beiden tritt uns aber sogleich eine Differenz entgegen, die in mancher Hinsicht mit dem bekannten Verhältnisz verglichen werden kann, welches zwischen den synoptischen Evangelien und dem des Johannes stattfindet. Wie die synoptischen Evangelien zunächst mehr nur die äussere, mit der jüdischen Messias-Idee zusammenhängende, Seite der Erscheinung Christi darstellen, das johanneische aber vor allem seine höhere Natur und das unmittelbar Göttliche in ihm ins Auge faszt, so hat auch der platonische Sokrates eine weit höhere ideellere Bedeutung als der xenophontische, mit welchem wir uns im Grunde immer nur auf dem Boden der Verhältnisse des unmittelbaren praktischen Lebens befinden [Yet we instantly encounter a difference between these two that in many respects may be likened to the well-known relation between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. Just as the Synoptic Gospels present primarily only the external aspect of Christ's appearance, the aspect connected with the Jewish idea of the Messiah, whereas the Gospel of John above all captures his higher nature and the immediately divine within him, so also the Platonic Socrates does indeed have an ideal significance far higher than the Xenophontic Socrates, with whom we in effect always find ourselves on the flat and even level of conditions belonging to the immediate practical life]." Baur's comment is not only striking but also to the point when one remembers that Xenophon's view of Socrates differs from the Synoptic Gospels in that the latter merely recorded the immediate, accurate picture of Christ's immediate existence (which, please note, did not signify anything else than what it was), and insofar as Matthew's seeming to have an apologetic objective, the [XIII 111] question at that time was to reconcile Christ's life with the idea of the Messiah, whereas Xenophon is dealing with a man whose immediate existence means something else than meets the eye at first glance, and insofar as he mounts a defense of him, he does this only in the form of an appeal to a subtilizing, right-honorable age. On the other hand, the comment about Plato's relation to John is also correct if one simply holds fast to the position that John found and immediately perceived in Christ everything that he, precisely by restraining himself to silence, presents in all its objectivity, because his eyes were opened to the immediate divinity in Christ; whereas Plato creates his Socrates by means of poetic productivity, since Socrates, precisely in his immediate existence, was only negative.

But first an exposition of each one separately.

XENOPHON

As a preliminary, we must recall that Xenophon had an objective (this is already a deficiency or an irksome redundancy) — namely, to show what a scandalous injustice it was for the Athenians to condemn Socrates to death. Indeed, Xenophon succeeded in this to such a singular degree that one would be more inclined to believe that it was Xenophon's objective to prove that it was foolishness or an error on the part of the Athenians to condemn Socrates, for Xenophon defends Socrates in such a way that he renders him not only innocent but also altogether innocuous — so much so that we wonder greatly about what kind of daimon must have bewitched the Athenians to such a degree that [XIII 112] they were able to see more in him than in any other good-natured, garrulous, droll character who does neither good nor evil, does not stand in anyone's way, and is so fervently well-intentioned toward the whole world if only it will listen to his slipshod nonsense. And what harmonia praestahilita [preestablished harmony] in lunacy, what higher unity in madness is there not inherent in Plato's and the Athenians' uniting to put to death and immortalize such a good-natured bourgeois as that? This, after all, would be an incomparable irony upon the world. Plato and the Athenians must have felt almost as uncomfortable with Xenophon's irenic intervention as one feels at times in an argument when — just as the point in dispute, precisely by being brought to a head, begins to be interesting — a helpful third party kindly takes it upon himself to reconcile the disputants, to take the whole matter back to a triviality. Finally, by eliminating all that was dangerous in Socrates, Xenophon actually reduced him totally in absurdum, in recompense, probably, for Socrates' having done this so often to others.

What makes it even more difficult to get a clear notion of Socrates' personality from Xenophon's account is the total lack of situation. The base on which the specific conversation moves is just as invisible and shallow as a straight line, just as monotonous as the single-color background that children and Nürnberg painters customarily use in their pictures. Yet situation was immensely important to Socrates' personality, which must have given an intimation of itself precisely by a secretive presence in and a mystical floating over the multicolored variety of exuberant Athenian life and which must have been explained by a duplexity of existence, much as the flying fish in relation to fish and birds. This emphasis on situation was especially significant in order to indicate that the true center for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam [everywhere and nowhere], in...